h he
said:

The fundamental rights of self-government, the right of each man
to cast his single vote and have it counted as it is cast, is of
greater and more lasting importance than any of the temporary
consequences which flow from the result of any election. Beyond
all matters of expediency and good administration lies the great
question of human liberty and equality, which can only be
maintained by the uncorrupted equal suffrage of every citizen;
and so sacred is this in the eyes of the law that years of
penitentiary service are prescribed for the interference with the
right of a single human being of the male sex to cast the vote
which the law allows him.

But there may be a moral guilt outside the law, of a character
quite similar to that which is so punished when it comes within
the terms of the statute, and it may be the crime, not of a
single lawbreaker, but of the entire community that establishes
the constitutions and enacts the statutes, which denies these
equal rights to citizens who are subject to equal burdens.
Wherever the rule of power is substituted for the just and
equitable principle that all who are subject to government should
have a voice in controlling it, we are guilty under the form of
law of the same violation of the just rights of others for which
the corruptor of elections and the forger of tally-sheets is
tried, convicted and incarcerated. Yet from the remotest times
the world has done this thing, for equal rights have never been
conceded to women, and so warped are our convictions by custom
and prejudice that a denial of their political equality seems as
natural as the breath we draw....

Paternalism in government, which seeks to do good to the people
against their will, is wrong in the Czar of Russia and in old
King George, but is quite right and just when it affects only our
wives, sisters and daughters! They have everything they need, why
ask the ballot? Ah, my friends, so long as they have not the
right to determine the thing they need, so long as the ultimate
sovereignty remains with men to say what is good and what is bad
for them, they are deprived of that which we, as men, esteem the
most precious of all rights. I suppose there never was a time
when men did not believe that women had everything th