s of industrial and political
rights. Every infringement of a person's political rights,
touches a hundred other rights adversely. Let me show you one
good that has come to woman through her ballot in Wyoming. The
payment of men and women teachers has been equalized by direct
statute, for political power always benefits the parties holding
it.

Let us look at a few other ways in which the United States has
touched the rights of women where protection has been secured her
by legislation outside of itself. One instance that has come to
my knowledge since I have been in your city, is in the case of
pensions for colored women. The United States not only secured
the ballot to the black male citizen outside of State authority,
but it has touched the family relation with its powerful hand. It
has assumed that the woman with whom a colored soldier was living
at the time of his death was his wife, notwithstanding he may
have lived for many years in recognized married relations with
another woman, and become the father of children by her during
this period. In one case coming under the cognizance of our
Washington lawyer, Mrs. Lockwood, a pension was, by United States
authority, thus granted to a woman living with such colored
soldier at the time of his death, although she had no other claim
upon it. This soldier, during the period of slavery, had been
married in his master's house to another woman by a regularly
ordained clergyman, and by that wife had become the father of
five or six children. This woman was his lawful widow, according
to State and church law. These children were his lawful children,
according to State and church law, but the United States stepped
in, and made this married woman an outcast, and left her children
in the world with the brand of illegitimacy. The women of the
Territories of Wyoming and Utah are not secure in their political
rights, because the women of the Nation have none. Scarcely a
session of Congress but some politician introduces a bill to
disfranchise the women of these Territories.

In regard to the religious aspects of this Utah question. I care
for it only so far as it touches woman's political rights,
although I do know that woman's political wrongs and her
religious wrongs have been very closely intermi