t, if she has the
qualifications which fit her to be one. And I claim that, where
there is a woman that has the requisite qualifications for
holding any office in the family, in the church, or in the state,
there is no reason why she should not be allowed to hold it. And
we shall have a perfect crystal idea of the state, with all its
contents, only when man understands the injunction, "What God
hath joined together let no man put asunder."[63] (Great
applause).

SUSAN B. ANTHONY read the following appeal to the Congress of the
United States for the enfranchisement of woman:

ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.

Adopted by the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention,
held in New York City, Thursday, May 10, 1866.

_To the Senate and House of Representatives_:

We have already appeared many times during the present session
before your honorable body, in petitions, asking the
enfranchisement of woman; and now, from this National Convention
we again make our appeal, and urge you to lay no hand on that
"pyramid of rights," the Constitution of the Fathers," unless to
add glory to its height and strength to its foundation.

We will not rehearse the oft-repeated arguments on the natural
rights of every citizen, pressed as they have been on the
nation's conscience for the last thirty years in securing freedom
for the black man, and so grandly echoed on the floor of Congress
during the past winter. We can not add one line or precept to the
inexhaustible speech recently made by Charles Sumner in the
Senate, to prove that "no just government can be formed without
the consent of the governed;" to prove the dignity, the
education, the power, the necessity, the salvation of the ballot
in the hand of every man and woman; to prove that a just
government and a true church rest alike on the sacred rights of
the individual.

As you are familiar with that speech of the session on "EQUAL
RIGHTS TO ALL," so convincing in facts, so clear in philosophy,
and so elaborate in quotations from the great minds of the past,
without reproducing the chain of argument, permit us to call your
attention to a few of its unanswerable assertions on the ballot:

I plead now for the ballot, as the great guarantee; and _the
only sufficient guarantee_--being in i