most flagrant injustice to deny this protection
to woman. I ask it because the Nation and not the State is
supreme.

PHOEBE W. COUZINS of Missouri, to whom had been assigned the
next thirty minutes, said: _Mr. Chairman, and Gentlemen of the
Judiciary Committee_: I am invited to speak of the dangers which
beset us at this hour in the decision of the Supreme Court of the
United States in Mrs. Minor's case, which not only stultifies its
previous interpretation of the recent constitutional amendments
and makes them a dead letter, but will rank, in the coming ages,
in the history of the judiciary, with the Dred Scott decision.
The law, as explained in the Dred Scott case, was an infamous
one, which trampled upon the most solemn rights of the loyal
citizens of the government, and declared the constitution to mean
anything or nothing, as the case might be. Yet the decision in
that case had a saving clause, for it was not the unanimous voice
of a Democratic judiciary. Dissenting opinions were nobly uttered
from the bench. In the more recent case, under the rule of a
Republican judiciary created by a party professing to be one of
justice, the rights of one-half of the people were deliberately
abrogated without a dissenting voice. This violation of the
fundamental principles of our government called forth no protest.
In all of the decisions against woman in the Republican court,
there has not been found one Lord Mansfield, who, rising to the
supreme height of an unbiased judgment, would give the immortal
decree that shall crown with regal dignity the mother of the
race: "I care not for the dictates of judges, however eminent, if
they be contrary to principle. If the parties will have judgment,
let justice be done, though the heavens fall."

The Dred Scott decision declared as the law of citizenship, "to
be a citizen is to have actual possession and enjoyment, or the
perfect right to the acquisition and enjoyment of an entire
equality of privileges, civil and political." But the slave-power
was then dominant and the court decided that a black man was not
a citizen because he had not the right to vote. But when the
constitution was so amended as to make "all persons born or
naturalized in the United States citizens thereof," a negro, by
virtue of h