ovision for
safeguarding the vote on constitutional amendments. Since election
laws do not protect suffrage referenda, suffragists justly demand the
method prescribed by our national constitution to appeal their case
from male voters at large to the higher court of Congress and the
Legislatures. (See Chapters III and IV.)

5. EQUAL STATUS OF MEN AND WOMEN VOTERS DEMANDS IT.

Until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment the National
Constitution did not discriminate against women but in Section 2 of
that amendment provision was made whereby a penalty may be directed
against any state which denies the right to vote to its _male
inhabitants_ possessed of the necessary qualifications as prescribed
by nation and state. If the entire 48 states should severally
enfranchise women their political status would still be inferior to
that of men, since no provision for national protection in their right
to vote would exist.

The women of eleven states are said to vote on equal terms with men.
As a matter of fact they do not, since they not only lose their vote
whenever they change their residence to any one of the 37 other states
(except Illinois, where they lose only a portion of their privileges),
but they enjoy no national protection in their right to vote. Women
justly demand "Equal Rights for All and Special Privileges for None."
Amendment to the National Constitution alone can give them an equal
status. Equality of rights can never be secured through state by state
enfranchisement.

6. NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF QUESTION DEMANDS IT.

Woman suffrage in every other country is a National question. With
eleven American states and nearly half the territory of the civilized
world already won; with the statement of the press still unchallenged
that women voters were "the balance of power" which decided the last
presidential election, the movement has reached a position of national
significance in the United States. Any policy which seeks to shift
responsibility or to procrastinate action, is, to use the mildest
phraseology, unworthy of the Congress in whose charge the making of
American political history reposes.

7. TREATMENT OF QUESTION DEMANDS INTELLIGENCE.

The handicaps of a popular vote upon a question of human liberty
which must be described in technical language will be clear to all
who think. It is probable that at least a fourth of the voters in West
Virginia, one of the recent suffrage campaign states, could