The SPEAKER.--Is there objection? The Chair hears none.

Mr. BUTLER, of Massachusetts.--I am honored with the duty of
presenting a petition for a declaratory law to assure the right
of suffrage to the women citizens of the United States. They
believe their absolute constitutional right is to vote. They here
and now desire to bring to the attention of Congress the
necessity of passing a new law declaring and executing that
right. They claim such a law in two views: first, as of right,
and secondly, as of expediency to the nation. They insist that
this their right ought to be secured to them by law, and they
insist also that it is expedient for the Republic that this right
should be accorded to them.

The mothers of the land, who shall form the characters of all its
citizens through their teaching in childhood, giving direction to
the thoughts which shall hereafter govern the land, may well
claim that it is expedient that they shall have a voice in making
the laws which govern them, which will give them greater freedom
of action than they now have, which will afford them higher
opportunities for noble culture than they now have, and raise
their thoughts to a plane worthy of the generation that shall
come after us, which must in all its social and moral qualities
take its impress from their teachings, so that the men of the
land shall then be as the women of the land now are; and as you
elevate and ennoble woman, in so much, in a greater ratio, will
our sons be better fitted for the great duties and
responsibilities of the future. No stream shall rise higher than
its fountain.

Sir, I recognize the fact that I have no right at this time to
trespass on the business and indulgence of the House to argue
the momentous question involved in this memorial, but I present
this petition of 35,000 women of America, from almost every State
in the Union. From every class and condition of life, from the
highest and most refined, and from the humblest and most lowly,
all are represented here, all asking that their claim to what
they conceive to be their greatest right, and which we claim to
be the inalienable right of every male citizen shall be granted
to them.

The unanimity with which they come here; the fact that without
organization, al