National and State Constitutions, and the organic laws of the
Territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the
exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to
bestow rights.

All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed.

Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, nor
exclusion of any class from their full and equal enjoyment. Here
is pronounced the rights of all men, and "consequently," as the
Quaker preacher said, "of all women," to a voice in the
government. And here, in this very first paragraph of the
Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the
ballot; for, how can "the consent of the governed" be given, if
the right to vote be denied. Again:

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its
foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in
such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
safety and happiness.

Surely, the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly
implied. For, however destructive to their happiness this
government might become, a disfranchised class could neither
alter nor abolish it, nor institute a new one, except by the old
brute force method of insurrection and rebellion. One half of the
people of this Nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from
the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a
just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of
government, that enforces taxation without representation,--that
compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their
consent--that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury
of their peers--that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of
their own persons, wages, and children--are this half of the
people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct
violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the
framers