hat "all the inhabitants of
this commonwealth, having such qualifications as they shall
establish by their frame of government, have an equal right to
elect officers, and to be elected for public employment." These
principles, after full and profound discussion by a generation of
statesmen whose authority upon these subjects is greater than
that of any other that ever lived, have been accepted by
substantially the whole American people as the dictates alike of
practical wisdom and of natural justice. The experience of a
hundred years has strengthened their hold upon the popular
conviction. Our fathers failed in three particulars to carry
these principles to their logical result. They required a
property qualification for the right to vote and to hold office.
They kept the negro in slavery. They excluded women from a share
in the government. The first two of these inconsistencies have
been remedied. The property test no longer exists. The fifteenth
amendment provides that race, color, or previous servitude shall
no longer be a disqualification. There are certain qualifications
of age, of residence, and, in some instances of education,
demanded; but these are such as all sane men may easily attain.

This report is not the place to discuss or vindicate the
correctness of this theory. In so far as the opponents of woman
suffrage are driven to deny it, for the purpose of an argument
addressed to the American people, they are driven to confess that
they are in the wrong. This people are committed to the doctrine
of universal suffrage by their constitutions, their history and
their opinions. They must stand by it or fall by it. The poorest,
humblest, feeblest of sane men has the ballot in his hand, and no
other man can show a better title to it. Those things wherein men
are unequal--intelligence, ability, integrity, experience, title
to public confidence by reason of previous public service--have
their natural and legitimate influence under a government wherein
each man's vote is counted, to quite as great a degree as under
any other form of government that ever existed.

We believe that the principle of universal suffrage stands to-day
stronger than ever in the judgment of mankind. Some eminent and
accomplished scholars, alarmed by the corruption a