Republic, and they and their
representatives are seated in official and legislative positions.
I, as an American-born woman, to-day enter my protest at being
compelled to live under laws made by this class of men very
largely, and myself being rendered utterly incapable of the
protection that can only come from the ballot. While I would not
have you take this right or privilege from those men whom we
invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this immense
foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent,
moral, native-born women of America.

Miss Anthony. And foreign women, too.

Mrs. Gougar. Miss Anthony suggests an amendment, and I indorse it
most heartily, and foreign women too, because if we let a foreign
man vote I say let the foreign woman vote. I am in favor of
universal suffrage.

Gentlemen, I ask this as a matter of justice; I ask it because it
is an insult to the intelligence of the present to draw the sex
line upon any right whatever. I know there are many objections
urged, and I am sure that you have considered this question; but
I only make the demand from the standpoint, not of sex, but of
humanity.

As a Northern woman, as a woman from Indiana, I know that we have
the intelligent, thinking, cultured, pure, patriotic men and
women with us. We have the women who are engaged in philanthropic
enterprises. We have in our own State the signatures of over 5,000
of the school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the
United States Government does not need the voice of those 5,000
educated school teachers as much as it needs the voice of the
240 male criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the
penitentiary of Indiana every year, who go to the ballot-box upon
every question whatever, and make laws under which those school
teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must
keep their homes and rear their children?

On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands
shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have
the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws that
shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority that only
has been made legal, but is never recognized, and so I ask you to
let the mothers carry their influence in protecting laws around
th