de. Brief and inadequate newspaper accounts are all
that remain.

CHAPTER III.

CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS AND REPORTS OF 1884.

Both Senate and House of the preceding Congress had appointed Select
Committees on Woman Suffrage to whom all petitions, etc., were
referred.[20] The Senate of the Forty-eighth Congress renewed this
committee, but the House declined to do so. Early in the session, Dec.
19, 1883, the Committee on Rules refused to report such a committee
but authorized Speaker Warren Keifer of Ohio to present the question
to the House. A spirited debate followed which displayed the sentiment
of members against the question of woman suffrage itself. John H.
Reagan of Texas was the principal opponent, saying in the course of
his remarks:

I hope that it will not be considered ungracious in me that I
oppose the wish of any lady. But when she so far misunderstands
her duty as to want to go to working on the roads and making
rails and serving in the militia and going into the army, I want
to protect her against it. I do not think that sort of employment
suits her sex or her physical strength. I think also, when we
attempt to overturn the social status of the world as it has
existed for six thousand years, we ought to begin somewhere where
we have a constitutional basis to stand upon....

But I suppose whoever clamors for action here finds a warrant for
it in the clamor outside, and it is not necessary to look to the
Constitution for it; it is not necessary to regard the interests
of civilization and the experience of ages in determining our
social as well as our political policy; but we will arrange it so
that there shall be no one to nurse the babies, no one to
superintend the household, but all shall go into the political
scramble, and we shall go back as rapidly as we can march into
barbarism. That is the effect of such doings as this,
disregarding the social interests of society for a clamor that
never ought to have been made.

Mr. Reagan then rambled into a long discussion of the rights allowed
under the Constitution, although no action had been proposed except
the mere appointment of a Select Committee, to whom all questions
relating to woman suffrage might be referred, such as already existed
in the Senate.

James B. Belford of Colorado in an able reply said:

I have no doubt that this House