this privilege, shall put the seal of
affirmation upon it; and there certainly can be no reason for an
amendment of the Constitution to settle a question within the
jurisdiction of the States, and which they should first settle
for themselves.

[Of course, according to this logic, after the States settle the
question and put the seal of affirmation on it, then the general
Government will take a hand!]

This House Report (No. 1330) was not drastic enough to suit the Hon.
Luke P. Poland (Vt.), so he made his own, in which he said:

No government founded upon the principle that sovereignty resides
in the people has ever allowed all the people to vote, or to
directly participate in making or administering the laws.
Suffrage has never been regarded as the natural right of all the
people or of any particular class or portion of the people.
Suffrage is representation, and it has been given in free
governments to such class of persons as in their judgment [whose
judgment?] would fairly and safely represent the rights and
interests of the whole. The right has generally, if not
universally, been conferred on men above twenty-one years of age,
and often this has been restricted by requiring the ownership of
property or the payment of taxes. [Which?]

The great majority of women are either under the age of
twenty-one, or are married and therefore _under such influence
and control_ as that relation implies and confers. Is there any
necessity for the protection and preservation of the rights of
women, that they must be allowed to vote and, of course, to hold
office and directly to participate in the administration of the
laws?

Nearly every man who votes has a wife or mother or sisters or
daughters; some sustain all these relations or more than one. I
think it certain that the great majority of men when voting or
when engaged as legislators or in administering the laws in some
official character, are fully mindful of the interests of all
that class with whom they are so closely connected, and whose
interests are so bound up with their own, and that, therefore,
they fairly represent all the rights and interests of women as
well as their own. Persons who have been accustomed to see legal
proceedings in the courts, and occasionally to see a female
litigant in co