he most vexatious and unmanageable. They were singularly
fierce, and I found it wholly impossible to avoid making enemies
of men who had supported me with zeal. I was tormented for months
about the post-office of a single small town in Franklin county,
where the rival parties pounced upon each other like cannibals,
and divided the whole community into two hostile camps. I was
obliged to give my days and nights to this wretched business, and
often received only curses for the sincerest endeavors to do what
I believed was right. The experience became absolutely sickening,
and could not be otherwise than seriously damaging to me politically.
Such matters were wholly foreign to the business of legislation,
and I wrote a very earnest letter to Mr. Jenckes, of Rhode Island,
heartily commending his measure proposed in the preceding Congress
for the reform of our Civil Service, and for which, as the real
pioneer of this movement, he deserves a monument.

It was on the eighth of December, 1868, that I submitted a proposed
amendment to the Constitution, declaring that "the right of suffrage
in the United States shall be based upon citizenship, and shall be
regulated by Congress"; and that "all citizens of the United States,
whether native or naturalized, shall enjoy this right equally,
without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on race,
color, or sex." This was prior to the ratification of the XV
Amendment, and I so numbered the proposition; but on further
reflection I preferred an amendment in the exact form of the
fifteenth, and early in the next Congress I submitted it, being
the first proposition offered for a sixteenth amendment to the
Constitution. My opinions about woman suffrage, however, date much
farther back. The subject was first brought to my attention in a
brief chapter on the "political non-existence of woman," in Miss
Martineau's book on "Society in America," which I read in 1847.
She there pithily states the substance of all that has since been
said respecting the logic of woman's right to the ballot, and
finding myself unable to answer it, I accepted it. On recently
referring to this chapter I find myself more impressed by its force
than when I first read it. "The most principled Democratic writers
on Government," she said, "have on this subject sunk into fallacies
as disgraceful as any advocate of despotism has adduced. In fact,
they have thus sunk, from being, for the moment, advocat