e the
constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a
XVI. Amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the
XIV. and XV. under protest; would never have done it but for
the pressing emergency of that hour; would have insisted
that the power of the original Constitution to protect all
citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have
been vindicated through the courts. But the newly made
freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth, nor time to
wait that slow process. Women possess all these in an
eminent degree; and I insist that they shall appeal to the
courts, and through them establish the powers of our
American _magna charta_, to protect every citizen of the
Republic.

But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel, I
went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's
right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to
them--they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of
having voted illegally. Senator Sumner, putting sex where he did
color, would have said:

Qualifications can not be in their nature permanent or
insurmountable. Sex can not be a qualification any more than
size, race, color, or previous condition of servitude. A
permanent or insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a
deprivation of the suffrage. In other words, it is the
tyranny of taxation without representation, against which
our revolutionary mothers, as well as fathers, rebelled.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result
in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to
pass a bill of attainder, or an _ex post facto_ law, and is
therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it, the
blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their
female posterity. To them, this government has no just powers
derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government
is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious
aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy; the most hateful ever
established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth,
where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where
the educated govern the ignor