ns and ministers. Three prominent ministers signed it for
moral purposes alone. When Mrs. Horsey was on her dying bed the
last time she ever signed her name was to a letter to go before
that convention. No one believed she would die. Mrs. Merrick
and myself went before the convention. I was invited before the
committee on the judiciary. I made an impression favorable enough
there to be invited before the convention with these ladies. I
addressed the convention. We made the petition then that we make
here; that we, the mothers of the land, are barred on every side
in the cause of reform. I have strived hard in the work of reform
for women. I pledged my father on his dying bed that I would never
cease that work until woman stood with man equal before the law,
so far as my efforts could accomplish it. Finding myself baffled
in that work, I could only take the course which we have adopted,
and urge the proposition of the sixteenth amendment.

I beg of you, gentlemen, to consider this question apart from the
manner in which it was formerly considered. We, as the women of
the nation, as the mothers, as the wives, have a right to be
heard, it seems to me, before the nation. We represent precisely
the position of the colonies when they plead, and, in the words of
Patrick Henry, they were "spurned with contempt from the foot of
the throne." We have been jeered and laughed at and ridiculed; but
this question has passed out of the region of ridicule.

The moral force inheres in woman and in man alike, and unless we
use all the moral power of the Government we certainly can not
exist as a Government.

We talk of centralization, we talk of division; we have the seeds
of decay in our Government, and unless right soon we use the moral
force and bring it forward in all its strength and bearing, we
certainly cannot exist as a happy nation. We do not exist as a
happy nation now. This clamor for woman's suffrage, for woman's
rights, for equal representation, is extending all over the land.

I plead because my work has been combatted in the cause of reform
everywhere that I have tried to accomplish anything. The children
that fill the houses of prostitution are not of foreign blood and
race. They come from sweet American homes, and for every woman
that went down some mother's heart broke. I plea