tread our inalienable rights into the dust? While all men,
everywhere, are rejoicing in new-found liberties, shall woman
alone be denied the rights, privileges, and immunities of
citizenship? While in England men are coming up from the coal
mines of Cornwall, from the factories of Birmingham and
Manchester, demanding the suffrage; while in frigid Russia the
22,000,000 newly-emancipated serfs are already claiming a voice
in the government; while here, in our own land, slaves, but just
rejoicing in the proclamation of emancipation, ignorant alike of
its power and significance, have the ballot unasked, unsought,
already laid at their feet--think you the daughters of Adams,
Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, in whose veins flows the blood of
two Revolutions, will forever linger round the campfires of an
old barbarism, with no longings to join this grand army of
freedom in its onward march to roll back the golden gates of a
higher and better civilization? Of all kinds of aristocracy, that
of sex is the most odious and unnatural; invading, as it does,
our homes, desecrating our family altars, dividing those whom God
has joined together, exalting the son above the mother who bore
him, and subjugating, everywhere, moral power to brute force.
Such a government would not be worth the blood and treasure so
freely poured out in its long struggles for freedom....

2. I urge a Sixteenth Amendment, because "manhood suffrage" or a
man's government, is civil, religious, and social
disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern,
selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest,
acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike
discord, disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood
and cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what slavery,
slaughter, and sacrifice, through what inquisitions and
imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy
creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries,
while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have been dead
alike to love and hope! The male element has held high carnival
thus far, it has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering
the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner
qualities in human nature, until we know but little of