rned."

For being born women we are obliged to help support those
who have earned nothing, and who, by gambling, drinking, and
the like, have come to poverty, and these same can vote away
what we have earned with our own hands. And when men meet to
take off the dollar poll-tax, the bill for the dinner comes
in for the women to pay. Neither have we husband, or
brother, or son, or even nephew, or cousin, to help us. All
men will acknowledge that it is as wrong to take a woman's
property without her consent as to take a man's without his
consent; and such wrong we suffer wholly for being born
women, which we are in no wise to blame for. To be sure, for
our consolation, we are upheld by the learned, the wise and
the good, from all parts of the country, having received
communications from thirty-two of our States, as well as
from over the seas, that we are in the right, and from many
of the best men in our own State. But they have no power to
help us. We therefore now pray your honorable body, who have
power, with the House of Assembly, to relieve us of this
stigma of birth, and grant that we may have the same
privileges before the law as though we were born men. And
this, as in duty bound, we will ever pray.

JULIA and ABBY SMITH.

_Glastonbury, Conn., January 29, 1878._

The story of the Smith sisters, from 1873 and on, will be handed
down as one of the most original and unique chapters in the
history of woman suffrage. Abby Smith, with my friend Mrs.
Buckingham, attended with me the first meeting of the Woman's
Congress, in New York, in October, 1873. While there, she said
she should, on her return, address her town's people on woman
suffrage and taxation, as they had not been treated fairly in the
matter of their taxes. She did so on the fifth of November,
addressing the Glastonbury town meeting in the little red-brick
town-house of that place--a building that will always hereafter
be connected with the names of Abby and Julia Smith. Several
years after, wishing to address them again, she was refused
entrance there, so she and Julia addressed the people from an
ox-cart that stood in f