be raised; it places
men in office or lays their heads low in the dust. It is the _will_ of a
man embodied in that little piece of paper; it is the consent of the
governed.

Are women governed? Most certainly; they pay taxes,--they are held
amenable to laws; they are tried for crimes; they are fined, imprisoned,
hung. The government wields strong power over them. Have they consented
to this power of the government? Have they a recognized right to the
ballot? Has their consent bean asked through their votes? Have they had
a voice in saying what taxes shall be levied on their property,--what
penalties they shall pay for crimes? _No._ They are ruled without their
consent. The first principles of government are founded on the natural
rights of individuals; in order to _secure_ the exercise of these
natural, individual rights our government professed to be founded.
Governments never created a single right; rights did not come new-born
into the world with our revolutionary fathers. They were men of middle
age when they severed their connexion with Great Britain, but that
severance did not endow them with a single new right. It was at that
time they first entered into the _exercise_ of their natural, individual
rights. Neither our Declaration, nor our Constitution created a single
right; they merely recognized certain rights as in existence. They
recognized those rights as human rights,--as inalienable rights,--as
rights existing by virtue of common humanity. Natural rights never
change, but the power to perceive these natural rights does change, and
various nations have had their own standard.

Three names, said to be the sweetest the world ever knew, are mother,
home, and heaven. There is one still sweeter--one for which men have
given up mother and home, and for which they have almost sacrificed the
hope of heaven; that word is LIBERTY.

When the fires of liberty began to creep through Europe in the middle
ages, at a time when hereditary monarchs and the catholic church ruled
the world, men placed its safeguards in municipal corporations. The idea
of municipal corporations descended from Rome to the rest of Europe, and
"free cities" became the germ of personal freedom. But a new world was
needed for the great experiment of individual freedom. Macauley calls
government an experimental science and therefore a progressive science;
history shows this to be true. Liberty did not spring "full armed" like
Minerva from the head