ant; or even an oligarchy of race,
where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but surely
this oligarchy of sex, which makes the men of every household
sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves; carrying
dissension, rebellion into every home of the Nation, can not be
endured. And yet this odious aristocracy exists in the face of
Section 4, of Article 4, which says:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in the
Union a Republican form of government.

What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the
inhabitants of a Monarchical and those of a Republican form of
government, save that in the Monarchical the people are subjects,
helpless, powerless, bound to obey laws made by superiors--while
in the Republican, the people are citizens, individual
sovereigns, all clothed with equal power, to make and unmake both
their laws and their law makers. And the moment you deprive a
person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade him
from the status of a citizen to that of a subject, and it matters
very little to him whether his monarch be an individual tyrant,
as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as here
in the United States.

But, it is urged, the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and
him, in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men
were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on
this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you
be consistent, and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which
would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of
the government, and from penalties for the violation of laws.

A year and a half ago I was at Walla Walla, Washington Territory.
I saw there a theatrical company, the "Pixley Sisters," playing
before crowded houses every night of the whole week of the
Territorial fair. The eldest of those three fatherless girls was
scarce eighteen. Yet every night a United States officer
stretched out his long fingers, and clutched six dollars of the
proceeds of the exhibitions of those orphan girls, who, but a few
years before, were starvelings in the streets of Olympia, the
capital of that far-off north-west territory. So the poor widow,
who keeps a boarding-house, manufactures shirts