atural right
to provide for the safety of her life and of the means to sustain it.
She has no rights whatever, and she lives upon mere privileges and
favors, if others may usurp her rights. In fact she lies at the mercy
of men, if men only may choose into whose hands to put the control of
her person and property.... I do not complain of Judge Hunt's
interpretations of the Constitution on the suffrage question. I do not
complain of his refusing to accept the constitutional recognition of
woman's right to vote, though that right seems to lie on the very
surface of the Constitution amongst her rights of citizenship. Nor do
I complain of his passing by this recognition to dig down into the
Constitution for proofs of there being two kinds of citizens--one that
can vote and one that can not vote. What I complain of is that he did
not hold as void, instead of arguing them to be valid, any words in
the instrument which seemed to him to favor the disfranchisement of
woman and consequent robbery and destruction of her rights. What I
complain of is that, instead of his conscientious regard for his oath,
he was not prepared to ignore and scout all human law so far as it is
antagonistic to natural law and natural rights....

How striking and instructive is the following extract from a speech
made a year or two ago in the Spanish Parliament: "Natural rights
dwell essentially in the individual, and are derived directly from his
own moral nature. They are therefore, so to speak, unlegislatable,
since they do not arise from the law, do not depend on the law, and,
not depending on the law, can not be abrogated by the law. Born of the
organic constitution of the individual, with the individual they live
and die, unless a tyrannical, unrighteous, and iniquitous law tears
them from him, and then he will have the right to protest forever
against this wrong and the iniquity of the law, and to rise against it
whenever he can. Well, my lords, the inalienable rights of the Cubans
have been torn from them by unrighteous, tyrannical, and iniquitous
laws." Would that Judge Hunt and all our judges might, ere long, take
the ground of this sublimely eloquent Spaniard, that natural rights
are "unlegislatable".... Would that my much esteemed friend, Judge
Hunt, had so far outgrown bad law and grown into good law, as to have
pronounced at your trial the disenthralment of woman, and thus have
set the name of Hunt in immortality by the side of the names of