alifications the State itself may have prescribed for
electors of State officers, the question who shall vote for
president and vice-president is on an entirely different basis,
and prescribing the qualifications for such electors lies in
entirely different hands. It is a question of national import
with which the State (in its constitution) has nothing to do, and
over which even congress has no power. The legislature which is
to assemble in Albany, the first Tuesday in January next, will
have power, by the passage of a simple bill, to secure to the
women of this State the right to vote for electors at the
presidential election in the fall of 1876, and thus to inaugurate
the centennial year by an act of equity and justice that will be
in accordance with that part of the Declaration of Independence
which declares that "governments derive their _just_ powers from
the consent of the governed." Shall it not be done?

MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE,
LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE,
CLEMENCE S. LOZIER, M. D.,
_N. Y. State Woman Suffrage Com._

[Illustration: Lillie Devereux Blake]

A memorial embodying this claim was presented to the legislature,
and on, January 18, the committee went to Albany and were heard by
the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly, to whom their paper had
been referred. Hon. Robert H. Strahan of New York presided. On
February 8, the memorialists[229] had another meeting before the
Judiciary Committee of the Senate, in the Senate chamber, Hon.
Bradford L. Prince presiding. The audience was overflowing, and the
corridors so crowded that the meeting adjourned to the Assembly
chamber by order of the chairman. Soon after, Hon. George H. West
of Saratoga presented a bill giving the women of the State the
right to vote for president. It was referred to the Judiciary
Committee and reported adversely, notwithstanding it was twice
called up and debated by its friends, Messrs. Strahan, Husted,
Ogden, Hogeboom and West. No vote was reached on the measure, but
this much of consideration was a gain over previous years, when
nothing had been done beyond the presentation of a bill and its
reference to a committee.

In 1876 Governor Samuel J. Tilden appointed Mrs. Josephine Shaw
Lowell as commissioner of the State Board of