Anonymous

“ It is a poor rule that won't work more ways than one. Establish this precedent, admit the right to deny suffrage to the states, and there is no power to foresee the confusion, discord and disruption that may await us. There is, and can be, but one safe principle of government—equal rights to all. And any and every discrimination against any class, whether on account of color, race, nativity, sex, property, culture, can but imbitter and disaffect that class, and thereby endanger the safety of the whole people. ”

“ What privilege or immunity has California or Oregon the constitutional right to deny them, save that of the ballot? Clearly, then, if the fourteenth amendment was not to secure to black men their right to vote, it did nothing for them, since they possessed everything else before. But, if it was meant to be a prohibition of the states, to deny or abridge their right to vote—which I fully believe—then it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or naturalized in the United States; for the amendment does not say all male persons of African descent, but all persons are citizens. ”

“ The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation,—that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent,—that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers, that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children,—are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. ”

“ She merely exercised her citizen's right of suffrage—a right to which she, and all women citizens are entitled by virtue of their citizenship in the nation—a right to which they are entitled because individual political rights are the basis of the government. The United States has no other foundation. If that right is trampled upon, we have no nation. We may hang together in a sort of anarchical way for a time, but our dissolution draws near. Can the United States destroy rights on account of sex? ”

“ You will be called upon to decide a question according to our great charters of liberty—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. You are to decide, not only on a question of natural right, but of absolute law, of the supreme law of the land. You are not to decide according to prejudice, but according to the constitution. If your decision is favorable to the defendant, you will sustain the constitution; if adverse, if you are blinded by prejudice; you will not decide against women alone, but against the United States as well. ”

“ If a new trial shall be denied to the defendant, it will be no consolation to her to be dismissed with a slight penalty, leaving the stigma resting upon her name, of conviction for an offence, of which she claims to be, and I believe is, as innocent as the purest of the millions of male voters who voted at the same election, are innocent of crime in so voting. If she is in fact guilty of the crime with which she stands charged, and of which she has been convicted by the court, she deserves the utmost penalty which the court under the law has power to impose ”

“ Surely, the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied. For however destructive to their happiness this government might become, a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and rebellion. One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one. ”

“ Special laws, or laws specially defined for one particular body of people, on account of race, color, sex, or occupation, is class legislation, and bears the seeds of death within itself. It was the boast of our forefathers, that the rights for which they contended were the rights of human nature. Shall the women of this country forever have cause to say that the declaration and the constitution are specially defined,—are organs of special law? ”

“ Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property. And when 100 or 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights ”

“ Then, to be a citizen of this republic, is no more than to be a subject of an empire. You and I, and all true and patriotic citizens must repudiate this base conclusion. We all know that American citizenship, without addition or qualification, means the possession of equal rights, civil and political. We all know that the crowning glory of every citizen of the United States is, that he can either give or withhold his vote from every law and every legislator under the government. ”

“ So long as merely physical power governed in the affairs of the world, the wrongs done to women were without the possibility of redress or relief; but since nations have come to be governed by laws, there is room to hope, though the process may still be a slow one, that injustice in all its forms, or at least political injustice, may be extinguished. No injustice can be greater than to deny to any class of citizens not guilty of crime, all share in the political power of a state, that is, all share in the choice of rulers, and in the making and administration of the laws. ”

“ Is it less pertinent for us to ask if personal representation is not more sacred than property representation? "Where governments lead, there are no revolutions," said the eloquent Castelar. But revolution is imminent in a government like ours, instituted by the people, for the people, in its charters recognizing the most sacred rights of the people, but which, in a sovereign capacity, through its officials, tramples upon the most sacredly secured and guaranteed rights of the people. ”

“ Miss Anthony, herself, has already come under its provisions, and were she denied a speedy and open trial, she could appeal to the protection of this very amendment, which not only does not say women, or her, but does alone say him and his, and this, notwithstanding the other legal adage, that laws stand as they are written. This whole question of constitutional rights, turns on whether the United States is a nation. If the United States is a nation, it has national powers. What is the admitted basis of our nation? We reply, equality of political rights. ”

“ The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce man to a state of slavery; for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another; and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. The proposal, therefore, to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away property. ”

“ Does B's misapprehension of his rights justify his act? Would a Judge be justified in charging the jury that if satisfied that B supposed he had a right to shoot A he was justified, and they should find a verdict of not guilty? No Judge would make such a charge. To constitute a crime, it is true, that there must be a criminal intent, but it is equally true that knowledge of the facts of the case is always held to supply this intent. An intentional killing bears with it evidence of malice in law. Whoever, without justifiable cause, intentionally kills his neighbor, is guilty of a crime. ”

“ It was not the thirteen States as States, not the government in its sovereign capacity, but the people: not the white people alone, not the native born alone, not the male people alone, but the people in a collective sense. Justice was not established by this Constitution if one half the people were left out from its provisions, neither was the common welfare considered unless all people in common, equally shared the benefits of the Constitution. ”

“ It was at that time they first entered into the exercise of their natural, individual rights. Neither our Declaration, nor our Constitution created a single right; they merely recognized certain rights as in existence. They recognized those rights as human rights,—as inalienable rights,—as rights existing by virtue of common humanity. Natural rights never change, but the power to perceive these natural rights does change, and various nations have had their own standard. ”

“ As the law is now interpreted, the man who owned that house and lot could vote a tax upon the property of all those women at his own will, to build City Halls, Court Houses, Jails, could call an election and vote an extraordinary tax to bring in water from a dozen different lakes, erect fountains at every corner, fence in twenty parks, vote himself in, Mayor, Alderman, Assessor, Collector with a fat salary from these women's money, attached to each one of these offices, and in the end elect himself the sole policeman of the city, to protect the women from—himself ”

“ That liberty or freedom consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who are to frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every man's life, property and peace. For the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right, but more need to have representatives in the Legislature than the rich one. That they who have no voice or vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and their representatives ”

“ And this opinion of Attorney General Bates, that a black citizen was not a voter, made merely to suit the political exigency of the republican party, in that transition hour between emancipation and enfranchisement, was no less infamous, in spirit or purpose, than was the decision of Judge Taney, that a black man was not one of the people, rendered in the interest and at the behest of the old democratic party, in its darkest hour of subjection to the slave power. ”

“ You will not find one such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James Otis when he said:
"The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights, and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For, what one civil right is worth a rush after a man's property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor in person, or by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is wholly at the mercy of others." ”

“ The crime consists in voting "knowingly," without lawful right. Unless the knowledge exists in fact, is the very gist of the offence is wanting. To hold that the law presumes conclusively that such knowledge exists in all cases where the legal right is wanting, and to reject all evidence to the contrary, or to deny to such evidence any effect, as has been done on this trial, is to strike the word "knowingly" out of the statute—and to condemn the defendant on the legal fiction that she was acting in bad faith, it being all the while conceded that she was in fact acting in good faith. ”

“ What prevents them unless it is unjust illegal power? The ninth amendment declares that the enumeration of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny, or disparage others retained by the people. Remember what are the foundation principles of just government, principles fully acted upon by the old revolutionists; remember that no government of whatever kind or character can possibly create the right of self-government, but only recognize rights as existent; remember the non-use of a right does not destroy that right. ”

“ The possession of this voice, in the making and administration of the laws—this political right—is what gives security and value to the other rights, which are merely personal, not political. A person deprived of political rights is essentially a slave, because he holds his personal rights subject to the will of those who possess the political power. This principle constitutes the very corner-stone of our government—indeed, of all republican government. Upon that basis our separation from Great Britain was justified. "Taxation without representation is tyranny." ”

“ On the contrary, the world has never seen an aristocracy, whether composed of few or many, powerful enough to control a government, who did not honestly believe that their interest was identical with the public interest, and who did not act persistently in accordance with such belief; and, unfortunately, an aristocracy of sex has not proved an exception to the rule. The only method yet discovered of overcoming this tendency to the selfish use of power, whether consciously or unconsciously, by those possessing it, is the distribution of the power among all who are its subjects. ”

“ Individual responsibility, personal representation, exact political equality, are the only stable foundations of a republic, and when the United States makes voting a crime on the part of any free-born, law-abiding citizen, it strikes a blow at its own stability ”