r and ignorant; but we may live to see the
poor, hardworking, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and native born,
learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of numbers,
combine and amend state constitutions so as to disfranchise the
Vanderbilts and A.T. Stewarts, the Conklings and Fentons. It is a poor
rule that won't work more ways than one. Establish this precedent, admit
the right to deny suffrage to the states, and there is no power to
foresee the confusion, discord and disruption that may await us. There
is, and can be, but one safe principle of government--equal rights to
all. And any and every discrimination against any class, whether on
account of color, race, nativity, sex, property, culture, can but
imbitter and disaffect that class, and thereby endanger the safety of
the whole people.

Clearly, then, the national government must not only define the rights
of citizens, but it must stretch out its powerful hand and protect them
in every state in this Union.

But if you will insist that the fifteenth amendment's emphatic
interdiction against robbing United States citizens of their right to
vote, "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,"
is a recognition of the right, either of the United States, or any
state, to rob citizens of that right, for any or all other reasons, I
will prove to you that the class of citizens for which I now plead, and
to which I belong, may be, and are, by all the principles of our
government, and many of the laws of the states, included under the term
"previous condition of servitude."

First.--The married women and their legal status. What is servitude?
"The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person who is robbed of
the proceeds of his labor; a person who is subject to the will of
another."

By the law of Georgia, South Carolina, and all the states of the South,
the negro had no right to the custody and control of his person. He
belonged to his master. If he was disobedient, the master had the right
to use correction. If the negro didn't like the correction, and
attempted to run away, the master had a right to use coercion to bring
him back.

By the law of every state in this Union to-day, North as well as South,
the married woman has no right to the custody and control of her person.
The wife belongs to her husband; and if she refuses obedience to his
will, he may use moderate correction, and if she doesn't like his
moderate correctio