time on the floor
of this House and on the floor of the Senate. When it was
proposed to abolish slavery in the United States, distinguished
gentlemen argued that it was unconstitutional to amend the
Constitution so as to abolish slavery. But all that has passed
away and we now find ourselves, in the light of the present,
seeing clearly that we may amend the Constitution in any way we
please, pursuing always the proper constitutional methods of
doing so.

There are considerations due to the women of this country which
ought not to be lightly thrust aside. For thirty-five years they
have been petitioning and holding conventions and demanding that
certain relief should be granted them, to the extent of allowing
them to exercise the right of suffrage. In that thirty-five years
we have seen great things accomplished. We have seen some of the
subtleties of the Common Law, which were spread over this
country, swept away. There is hardly anybody anywhere who now
adheres to the doctrine that a married woman can not make a
contract, and that she has no rights or liabilities except those
which are centered in her husband. Even the old Common-Law maxim
that "husband and wife are one, and that one the husband," has
been largely modified under the influence of these patriotic,
earnest ladies who have taken hold of this question and
enlightened the world upon it. There are now in the vaults of
this Capitol _hundreds of thousands of petitions_ for relief,
sent in here by women and by those who believed that women ought
to have certain rights and privileges of citizenship granted to
them. For sixteen years there has been held in this city,
annually, a convention composed of representative women from all
parts of the country. These conventions, as well as various State
and local conventions, have been appealing for relief; and they
ought not to be met by the statement that we will not even give
them the poor privilege of a committee to whom their petitions
and memorials may be referred.

We have made some progress. In 1871 there was a very strong
minority report made in this House in favor of woman suffrage.
Notwithstanding the notion that we must stand by all our old
ideas, the Supreme Court of the United States, after deliberately
considering the