nate ready for the question
on the motion of the senator from Delaware?

Mr. BAYARD and Mr. FARLEY called for the yeas and nays, and they
were ordered.

Mr. BECK: Mr. President, I have received a number of
communications from very respectable ladies in my own State upon
this important question; but I am unable to comply with their
request and support the female suffrage which they advocate. I
shall vote for the reference to the Committee on the Judiciary in
order that there may be a thorough investigation of the question.
I wholly disagree with the suggestion of the senator from
Illinois [Mr. Logan], that a committee ought to be appointed as
favorable to the views of these ladies as possible. I desire a
committee that will have no views, for or against them, except
what is best for the public good. Such a committee I understand
the Committee on the Judiciary to be.

I desire to say only in a word that the difficulty I have and the
question I desire the Committee on the Judiciary to report upon
is, the effect of this question upon suffrage. By the fifteenth
amendment to the Constitution of the United States there can be
no discrimination made in regard to voting on account of race,
color or previous condition. Intelligence is properly regarded as
one of the fundamental principles of fair suffrage. We have been
compelled in the last ten years to allow all the colored men of
the South to become voters. There is a mass of ignorance there to
be absorbed that will take years and years of care in order to
bring that class up to the standard of intelligent voters. The
several States are addressing themselves to that task as
earnestly as possible. Now it is proposed that all the women of
the country shall vote; that all the colored women of the South,
who are as much more ignorant than the colored men as it is
possible to imagine, shall vote. Not one perhaps in a hundred of
them can read or write. The colored men have had the advantages
of communication with other men in a variety of forms. Many of
them have considerable intelligence; but the colored women have
not had equal chances. Take them from their wash-tubs and their
household work and they are absolutely ignorant of the new duties
of voting citizens. The intelligent ladies of the North