Taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent
in person, or by representation.

I can see no reason to doubt but that the imposition of
taxes, whether on trade, or on land, or houses, or ships, or
real or personal, fixed or floating, property in the
colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of
the colonies, as British subjects, _and as men_. I say men,
for in a state of nature no man can take any property from
me without my consent. _If he does, he deprives me of my
liberty and makes me a slave._ The very act of taxing,
exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me
to deprive them of one of their most essential rights as
freemen, 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?

In demanding suffrage for the black man you recognize the fact
that as a freedman he is no longer a "part of the family," and
that, therefore, his master is no longer his representative;
hence, as he will now be liable to taxation, he must also have
representation. Woman, on the contrary, has never been such a
"part of the family" as to escape taxation. Although there has
been no formal proclamation giving her an individual existence,
she has always had the right to property and wages, the right to
make contracts and do business in her own name. And even married
women, by recent legislation, have been secured in these civil
rights. Woman now holds a vast amount of the property in the
country, and pays her full proportion of taxes, revenue included.
On what principle, then, do you deny her representation? By what
process of reasoning Charles Sumner was able to stand up in the
Senate, a few days after these sublime utterances, and rebuke
15,000,000 disfranchised tax-payers for the exercise of their
right of petition merely, is past understanding. If he felt that
this was not the time for woman to even mention her right to
representation, why did he not take breath in some of his
splendid periods, and propose to release the poor shirtmakers,
milliners and dressmakers, and all women of