eenth Amendments. Accordingly, we abandoned,
for the time being, our demand for a sixteenth amendment, and
pleaded our right of suffrage, as already secured by the
fourteenth amendment--the argument lying in a nut-shell. For if,
as therein asserted, all persons born or naturalized in the
United States are citizens of the United States; and if a
citizen, according to the best authorities, is one possessed of
all the rights and privileges of citizenship, namely, the right
to make laws and choose lawmakers, women, being persons, must be
citizens, and therefore entitled to the rights of citizenship,
the chief of which is the right to vote.

Accordingly, women tested their right, registered and voted--the
inspectors of election accepting the argument, for which
inspectors and women alike were arrested, tried and punished; the
courts deciding that although by the fourteenth amendment they
were citizens, still, citizenship did not carry with it the right
to vote. But granting the premise of the Supreme Court decision,
"that the constitution does not confer suffrage on any one," then
it inhered with the citizen before the constitution was framed.
Our national life does not date from that instrument. The
constitution is not the original declaration of rights. It was
not framed until eleven years after our existence as a nation,
nor fully ratified until nearly fourteen years after the
inauguration of our national independence.

But however the letter and spirit of the constitution may be
interpreted by the people, the judiciary of the nation has
uniformly proved itself the echo of the party in power. When the
slave power was dominant the Supreme Court decided that a black
man was not a citizen, because he had not the right to vote; and
when the constitution was so amended as to make all persons
citizens, the same high tribunal decided that a woman, though a
citizen, had not the right to vote. An African, by virtue of his
United States citizenship, is declared, under recent amendments,
a voter in every State of the Union; but when a woman, by virtue
of her United States citizenship, applies to the Supreme Court
for protection in the exercise of this same right, she is
remanded to the State, by the unanimous decision of the nine
judges on the bench