a Beecher Hooker (Conn.) on the
Duty of Woman Citizens of the United States in the Present Political
Crisis, was read by Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.), who enforced its
sentiments by earnest and stirring remarks of her own. Mrs. Mary
Church Terrell, A. M. of Oberlin College, president of the National
Association of Colored Women and a member of the Washington School
Board, considered the Justice of Woman Suffrage:

....To assign reasons in this day and time why it is unjust to
deprive one-half of the human race of rights and privileges
freely accorded to the other, which is neither more deserving nor
more capable of exercising them, seems like a reflection upon the
intelligence of the audience. As a nation we professed long ago
to have abandoned the principle that might makes right. Before
the world we pose to-day as a government whose citizens have the
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in
spite of these lofty professions and noble sentiments, the
present policy of this government is to hold one-half of its
citizens in legal subjection to the other, without being able to
assign good and sufficient reasons for such a flagrant violation
of the very principles upon which it was founded.

When one observes how all the most honorable and lucrative
positions in Church and State have been reserved for men,
according to laws which they themselves have made so as to debar
women; how, until recently, a married woman's property was under
the exclusive control of her husband; how, in all transactions
where husband and wife are considered one, the law makes the
husband that one--man's boasted chivalry to the disfranchised sex
is punctured beyond repair.

These unjust discriminations will ever remain, until the source
from which they spring--the political disfranchisement of
woman--shall be removed. The injustice involved in denying woman
the suffrage is not confined to the disfranchised sex alone, but
extends to the nation as well, in that it is deprived of the
excellent service which woman might render....

The argument that it is unnatural for woman to vote is as old as
the rock-ribbed and ancient hills. Whatever is unusual is called
unnatural, the world over. Whenever humanity takes a step forward
in progress, some old custom falls dead at our