, that "the Constitution of the United States
does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one." Such
vacillating interpretations of constitutional law must unsettle
our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of
the whole people. Seeing by these decisions of the courts that
the theory of our government, the Declaration of Independence,
and recent constitutional amendments, have no significance for
woman, that all the grand principles of equality are glittering
generalities for her, we must fall back once more to our former
demand of a sixteenth amendment to the federal constitution,
that, in clear, unmistakable language, shall declare the status
of woman in this republic.

The Declaration of Independence struck a blow at every existent
form of government by making the individual the source of all
power. This is the sun, and the one central truth around which
all genuine republics must keep their course or perish. National
supremacy means something more than power to levy war, conclude
peace, contract alliances, establish commerce. It means national
protection and security in the exercise of the right of
self-government, which comes alone by and through the use of the
ballot. Women are the only class of citizens still wholly
unrepresented in the government, and yet we possess every
requisite qualification for voters in the United States. Women
possess property and education; we take out naturalization-papers
and passports and register ships. We preempt lands, pay taxes
(women sometimes work out the road-tax with their own hands) and
suffer for our own violation of laws. We are neither idiots,
lunatics, nor criminals, and according to our State constitution
lack but one qualification for voters, namely, sex, which is an
insurmountable qualification, and therefore equivalent to a bill
of attainder against one-half the people, a power neither the
States nor the United States can legally exercise, being
forbidden in article 1, sections 9, 10, of the constitution. Our
rulers have the right to regulate the suffrage, but they cannot
abolish it for any class of citizens, as has been done in the
case of the women of this republic, without a direct violation of
the fundamental law of the land. All concessions of privileges or
re