Constitution, others said the Constitution as it is, in spirit
and letter, is broad enough to protect the rights of every
citizen under our flag. But when the war came and we saw that it
took three amendments to make the slaves of the South
full-fledged citizens, we thought it would take at least one to
make woman's calling and election sure. So we asked for a
Sixteenth Amendment. But learned lawyers, Judges and Congressmen
took the ground that women were already enfranchised by the
Fourteenth Amendment. The House minority report in 1871, signed
by Benjamin F. Butler and William Loughridge, held that view. It
is an able, unanswerable argument on the whole question, based on
the oft-repeated principles of the Republican party at that
time. It stands to-day a living monument of the grossest
inconsistencies of which the Republican party ever was
guilty.[76] ...

We can not play fast and loose with the eternal principle of
justice without being caught sooner or later in the net of our
own weaving. The legitimate results of the war have been all
frittered away by political maneuvering. While Northern statesmen
have made a football of the rights of 12,000,000 women as voters,
and by Supreme Court decisions driven them from the polls, why
arraign the men in the South for treating 1,000,000 freedmen in
the same way? Are the rights of that class of citizens more
sacred than ours? Are the violations of the fundamental
principles of our Government in their case more dangerous than in
ours?...

In addressing those who already enjoy the right of suffrage, one
naturally would suppose that it would not be necessary to enlarge
on the advantages of having a voice in deciding the laws and the
rulers under which one lives. And neither would it if each member
of this committee understood that woman's wants and needs are
similar to his own; that the cardinal virtues belong to her as
well as to him; that personal dignity, the power of
self-protection, are as important for her as for him; that woman
loves justice, equality, liberty, and wishes the right to give
her consent to the Government under which she lives, as much as
man does. Matthew Arnold says: "The first desire of every
cultured mind is to take part in the great work of government."
...