or many
years, gave birth at last to new demands for another class of
outraged citizens. Thus liberty is ever born of the hateful spirit
of persecution. One question of reform settled forever by
the civil war, the initiative for the next was soon taken. In
_The Revolution_ of January 16, 1868, we find the following
well-considered report on woman's enfranchisement, presented by a
minority of the Committee on Constitutional Amendments to the
legislature of Connecticut at its session of 1867:

The undersigned members of the committee believe that the prayer
of the petitioners ought to be granted. It would be much easier
for us to reject the petition and silently to acquiesce in the
opinions of the majority upon the subject to which it relates,
but our attention was challenged and an investigation invited by
the bold axioms upon which the cause of suffrage for woman was
claimed to rest, and the more we have examined the subject the
more convinced we have become that the logic of our institutions
requires a concession of that right. It is claimed by some that
the right to vote is not a natural right, but that it is a
privilege which some have acquired, and which may be granted to
others at the option of the fortunate holders. But they fail to
inform us how the possessors first acquired the privilege, and
especially how they acquired the rightful power to withhold that
privilege from others, according to caprice or notions of
expediency. We hold this doctrine to be pernicious in tendency,
and hostile to the spirit of a republican government; and we
believe that it can only be justified by the same arguments that
are used to justify slavery or monarchy--for it is an obvious
deduction of logic that if one thousand persons have a right to
govern another thousand without their consent, one man has a
right to govern all.

Mr. Lincoln tersely said, "If slavery is not wrong nothing is
wrong." So it seems to us that if the right to vote is not a
natural right, there is no such thing as a natural right in human
relations. The right to freedom and the right to a ballot both
spring from the same source. The right to vote is only the right
to a legitimate use of freedom. It is plain that if a man is not
free to govern himself, and to have a voice in the taxation of
his own property, he