nished
without a jury of their peers. And is all this tyranny any less
humiliating and degrading to women under our
democratic-republican government to-day than it was to men under
their aristocratic, monarchical government one hundred years ago?
There is not an utterance of old John Adams, John Hancock, or
Patrick Henry, but finds a living response in the soul of every
intelligent, patriotic woman of the nation. Bring to me a
common-sense woman property holder, and I will show you one whose
soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776, every time the
tax-gatherer presents himself at her door. You will not find one
such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James
Otis when he said:

The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not
represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of
their most essential rights, and if continued, seems to be
in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right.
For, what one civil right is worth a rush after a man's
property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without
his consent? If a man is not his own assessor in person, or
by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is wholly at the mercy
of others.

What was the three-penny tax on tea, or the paltry tax on paper
and sugar to which our revolutionary fathers were subjected, when
compared with the taxation of the women of this Republic? The
orphaned Pixley sisters, six dollars a day; and even the women
who are proclaiming the tyranny of taxation without
representation, from city to city throughout the country, are
often compelled to pay a tax for the poor privilege of protesting
against the outrage. And again, to show that disfranchisement was
precisely the slavery of which the fathers complained, allow me
to cite to you old Ben. Franklin, who in those olden times was
admitted to be good authority, not merely in domestic economy,
but in political as well:

Every man of the commonalty, except infants, insane persons
and criminals, is, of common right and the law of God, a
freeman and entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. That
liberty or freedom consists in having an actual share in the
appointment of those who are to frame the laws, and