ay decide what I am. I
stand before you, but I do not know to-day whether I am legally a
"person" according to the law. It has been decided in some States
that we are not "persons." In the State of New York, in one
village, it was decided that women are not inhabitants. So I
should like to know whether I am a person, whether I am an
inhabitant, and above all I ask you for the ballot that I may
become a citizen of this great Republic.

Gentlemen, you see before you this great convention of women from
the Atlantic slopes to the Pacific Ocean, from the North to the
South. We are in dead earnest. A reform never goes backward. This
is a question that is before the American nation. Will you do your
duty and give us our liberty, or will you leave it for braver
hearts to do what must be done? For, like our forefathers, we will
ask until we have gained it.

Ever the world goes round and round; Ever the truth comes
uppermost; and ever is justice done.

REMARKS BY MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.

Miss ANTHONY. I now have the pleasure of introducing to the
committee Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, of New York. New York is
a great State, and therefore it has three representatives here
to-day.

Mrs. BLAKE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: A recent
writer in an English magazine, in speaking of the great advantage
which to-day flows to the laboring classes of that nation from
having received the right of suffrage, made the statement that
disfranchised classes are oppressed, not because there is any
desire whatever to do injustice to them, but because they are
forgotten. We have year after year and session after session of
our legislatures and of our Congresses proved the correctness
of this statement. While we have nothing to complain of in the
courtesy which we receive in private life, still when we see
masses of men assembled together for political action, whether
it be of the nation or of the State, we find that the women are
totally forgotten.

In the limited time that is mine I cannot go into any lengthy
exposition upon this point. I will simply call your attention to
the total forgetfulness of the Congress of the United States to
the debt owed to the women of this nation during the war. You
have passed a pension bill upon which there has been much comment