“ May I ask you to bring to that labor as fair a spirit, as unprejudiced an outlook, as just a decision as he would have done?
I ask this not as a partisan of woman's rights, but as a lover of the human race. In this faint dawn of woman's day, I discern not woman's development of freedom merely, but the promise of that higher, finer, purer civilization which is to redeem the world, the lack of which makes men tyrants and women slaves. ”

“ Believing with the immortal Declaration of Independence that taxation and representation are inseparable; believing that the constitution of the State furnishes no authority for the taxation of woman; believing also that the constitution of the higher law of God, written on the human soul, requires us, if we would be worthy the rich inheritance of the past and true to ourselves and the future, to yield obedience to no statute that shall tend to fetter its aspirations, I shall henceforth pay no taxes until the word male is stricken from the voting clauses of the constitution of Massachusetts. ”

“ At this time, when the great ones of the earth are met together in earnest thought and honest discussion, when each mind and conscience is attuned to the highest motive, how appropriate that woman, whose labor, wealth and brain have cemented the stones in every monument that man has reared to himself;-that woman, the oppressed, woman, the hater of wars, the faithful, quiet drudge of the centuries, watching while others slept, working while others plundered and murdered; woman, who has died in prison and on the scaffold for liberty, should here and now have her audience and her advocates. ”

“ I ask for a sixteenth amendment because this republic is a nation and not a confederacy of States. I ask it because the United States not only possesses inherent power to protect its citizens but also because of its national duty to secure to all its citizens the exercise of their rights of self-government. I ask it because having created classes of voters in numberless instances, it is most flagrant injustice to deny this protection to woman. ”

“ While man has rendered such royal service in the realm of art, woman has not been idle. Infinite wisdom has intrusted to her the living, breathing marble or canvas, and with smiles and tears, prayers and songs has she patiently wrought developing the latent possibilities of the divine Christ-child, the infant Washington, the baby Lincoln. Ah! since God and men have intrusted to woman the weightiest responsibility known to earth, the development and education of the human soul, need you fear to intrust her with citizenship? Is the ballot more precious than the soul of your child? ”

“ And now, at the close of a hundred years, as the hour-hand of the great clock that marks the centuries points to 1876, we declare our faith in the principles of self-government; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself—to all the opportunities and advantages life affords for her complete development; and we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man—her best interests, in all cases, to be sacrificed to his will. ”

“ If experience has given you wisdom, even of this world, in managing your property and mine, I should be wise to learn from you. But injustice is not wont to yield wisdom; grapes do not grow of thorns, nor figs of thistles.
Born of the unjust and cruel subjection of woman to man, we have in these United States a harvest of 116,000 paupers, 36,000 criminals, and such a mighty host of blind, deaf and dumb, idiotic, insane, feeble-minded, and children with tendencies to crime, as almost to lead one to hope for the extinction of the human race rather than for its perpetuation after its own kind. ”

“ The custom of holding conventions at the seat of government in mid-winter has many advantages. Congress is then in session, the Supreme Court sitting, and society, that mystic, headless, power, at the height of its glory. Being the season for official receptions, where one meets foreign diplomats from every civilized nation, it is the time chosen by strangers to visit our beautiful capital. Washington is the modern Rome to which all roads lead, the bright cynosure of all eyes, and is alike the hope and fear of worn-out politicians and aspiring pilgrims. ”

“ May not our hearts, in unison with all, swell with pride at our great achievements as a people; our free speech, free press, free schools, free church, and the rapid progress we have made in material wealth, trade, commerce and the inventive arts? And we do rejoice in the success, thus far, of our experiment of self-government. Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the corner stones of a republic. ”

“ You cannot be unconscious of the fact that a new race of women is born into the world, who, while they lack no womanly attribute, are the peers of any man in intellect and aspiration. It will be impossible long to deny to such women that equality before the law granted to the lowest creature that crawls, if he happens to be a man; denied to the highest creature that asks it, if she happens to be a woman.
On what authority, save that of the gross regality of physical strength, do you deny to a thoughtful, educated, tax-paying person the common rights of citizenship because she is a woman? ”

“ What could and what would woman do with the ballot which is not now as well done by man alone, to improve the conditions which envelope individual existence as with bands of iron? What good things—state them seriatim, as the lawyers say—could woman do in New Hampshire and in New York city, and ultimately among the savage tribes of the earth, which she cannot do as well without as with the suffrage? Would woman by her suffrage even help to remove illiteracy from Louisiana, intemperance from New England, and stop society from committing murder by the tenement-house abuses of New York? ”

“ We shall secure their amendment, so that under them there shall be exact and permanent political equality between men and women. Change is not only a law of life; it is an essential proof of the existence of life. This country has attained its greatness by ever enlarging the bounds of freedom.
In our hearts we feel that there is a word sweeter than mother, home, or heaven. That word is liberty. We ask it of you now. We say to you, secure to us this liberty—the same liberty you have yourselves. In doing this you will not render yourselves poor, but will make us rich indeed. ”

“ Woman's degraded, helpless position is the weak point in our institutions to-day; a disturbing force everywhere, severing family ties, filling our asylums with the deaf, the dumb, the blind; our prisons with criminals, our cities with drunkenness and prostitution; our homes with disease and death. It was the boast of the founders of the republic, that the rights for which they contended were the rights of human nature. ”

“ From the Revolution to the present hour, woman has stood by the side of father, husband, son and brother in defense of liberty. The heroic and self-sacrificing deeds of the women of this republic, both in peace and war, must not be forgotten. Together men and women have made this country what it is. And to-day, in this one-hundredth year of our existence, the women—as members of the nation—as citizens of the United States—ask national recognition of their right of suffrage. ”

“ Christianity teaches the rights of God, not the rights of man or woman. You may search the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, and not find one clear, strong, bold affirmation of human rights as such; yet it is on human rights as such—on the equality of all individuals, man or woman, with respect to natural rights—that the demand for woman suffrage must ultimately rest. I know I stand nearly alone in this, but I believe from my soul that the woman movement is fundamentally anti-Christian, and can find no deep justification but in the ideas, the spirit, and the faith of free religion. ”

“ It is folly to spend another century in expounding the equivocal language of the constitution. If under that instrument, supposed to be the Magna Charta of American liberties, all United States citizens do not stand equal before the law, it should without further delay be so amended as in plain, unmistakable language to declare what are the rights, privileges, and immunities that belong to citizens of a republic.
There is no reason why the people of to-day should be governed by the laws and constitutions of men long since dead and buried. ”

“ Liberty and the exercise of all political rights are so bound together, that to neglect one is to abandon all. Trial by a jury of one's peers is the essential principle of the administration of justice. To be a peer on a jury involves the whole principle of equal rights. To abandon this to man, is to accept subjection to man.
For women to neglect jury duty is to give men the exclusive privilege to judge women, and to abandon the right to be tried by a jury of their peers. How can men justly judge a woman? ”

“ In the name of all true womanhood I welcome this association in our midst as worthy of the highest honor.
We have lived to see the enlargement of woman's thought in all directions. From our laboratories, libraries, observatories, schools of medicine and law, universities of science, art and literature, she is advancing to the examination of the problems of life, with an eye single only to the glory of truth. ”

“ I care nothing for suffrage merely to stand beside men, or rush to the polls, or to take any privilege outside of my home, only, as Mrs. Wallace says, for humanity. I never realized the importance of this cause, until we were beaten back on every side in the work of reform. If we attempted to put women in charge of prisons, believing that wherever woman sins and suffers women should be there to teach, help and guide, every place was in the hands of men. If we made an effort to get women on the school-boards we were combated and could do nothing. ”

“ How apropos it is, then, that the women from all nations meet on the free soil of France to give to the world their declaration of rights. To-day we clasp hands and pledge hearts to the sacred cause of woman's emancipation. To-day we meet to thank France for the grand women whose lofty utterances come echoing and reëchoing to us through the corridors of time, and to thank her for her great men who have been the beacon lights to guide the world to higher civilization and greater hatred of oppression. ”

“ Look at the department of education, the doors of many colleges and universities thrown wide open to women; girls contending for, yea, and winning prizes over their brothers. In the working world they are rapidly filling places and climbing heights unknown to them before, realizing, in fact, the dreams, the hopes, the prophesies of the inspired women of by-gone centuries. In many departments of learning woman stands the peer of man, and when by higher education and profitable labor she becomes self-reliant and independent, then she must and will be free. ”

“ I permit not that senator to go further than myself in the line of universal public education. I have declared, over and over again, in every county in my State for the past ten years, that universal education should accompany universal suffrage, that the school-house should crown every mound in prairie and forest, that it was the temple of liberty and the altar of law and order. ”

“ I shall have more faith in the sincerity of the declarations of gentlemen of their desire to have the women vote when I see that they have made some step toward the restoration of the right of suffrage to the people of the District of Columbia. While they let this blot remain upon our law, while they allow this damning conviction to stand, they may stare us in the face and accuse us continually of a want of candor and sincerity on this subject, but they will address their arguments to me in vain, even as coming from men who have an infatuation upon the subject. ”

“ Women of either country can do nothing directly in promoting the movement in the other; and if they attempt to do so, there is danger that they may hinder and embarrass those who are bearing the burden and heat of the day. The only way in which mutual help can be given is through the women of each nation working to gain ground in their own country. Then, every step so gained, every actual advance of the boundaries of civil and political rights for women is a gain, not only to the country which has secured it, but to the cause of human freedom all over the world. ”

“ You have enforced this claim by half a century of heroic discussion—of persistent, unanswerable logic and appeal against the theory and practice of all nations, against all governments, codes and creeds. You proclaimed fifty years ago the novel doctrine that woman by nature is, and by law and usage should be, the absolute equal of man. A claim so self-evident should only have to be stated to be recognized by all civilized nations; and yet to this hour the highest civilization, equally with the lowest, is built on the slavery of woman. ”