instead of a State right. This prosecution is an open admission by the
United States, that voting is a _Constitutional right_.

But the prosecution is also an admission of unauthorized authority in
that by it, the United States _discriminates between citizens_. If there
is one point of our government more strongly fortified than another, it
is that the government is of the people. The Preamble of the
Constitution, heretofore quoted, _means all the people_, if language has
a meaning. _All_ the people are citizens, if the fourteenth amendment
has any signification at all.

If any minds are so obtuse as not to see that the ballot is an United
States right,--if any person before me still claims suffrage as a state
right alone, such person certainly cannot fail to see that under his
views the United States has been guilty of a high-handed outrage upon
Miss Anthony and the fourteen other women whom this great
government,--this _big United States_ has prosecuted. Under this view of
the right of suffrage such person cannot fail to see there has been
unauthorized interference by the United States, with the duties and
rights of the State of New York. And while Uncle Sam was thus busy last
winter over the prosecution of women citizens of the State of New York,
the State itself submitted in its Legislature, a resolution looking
towards the recognition by the State of the right of tax-paying women to
the ballot. Thus at one and the same time was seen the anomaly of a
prosecution by the United States of women of the State of New York for
an act that New York herself was resolving it right to perform, and
which if the ballot is not a constitutional right, the United States has
no power over at all.

Look at this prosecution as you will, it presents a fine dilemma to
solve; it presents to the country, as never before, the most important
and vital question of United States rights; it presents the most
important and vital question of unconstitutional power which has grown
to such dimensions in the hands of United States officials; and it must
bring to people's cognizance the very slight thread by which hangs the
security of any citizen's right to the ballot.

Governments try themselves. No government has been stable in the past;
all have fallen because all have been one-sided; all have permitted the
degradation of woman. Babylon fell; her religion defiled woman; the
hand-writing appeared upon the wall, and in a single night she was