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rd. We must not be cheated by any such phantom, or any other fiction of law or politics, or any monkish trick of deceit or blasphemy." These are the sharp words used by the patriot Otis, speaking of those who were trying to convince American citizens that they were virtually represented in Parliament Sumner applied the same principle to the freedmen: it is now applied to women. "Taxation without representation is tyranny." "Virtual representation is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd." No ingenuity, no evasion, can give any escape from these plain principles. Either you must revoke the maxims of the American Revolution, or you must enfranchise woman. Stuart Mill well says in his autobiography, "The interest of woman is included in that of man exactly as much (and no more) as that of subjects in that of kings." [Footnote 1: Otis, _Rights of the Colonies_, p. 58.] [Footnote 2: Sparks's _Franklin_, ii. 372.] FOUNDED ON A ROCK If there is any one who is recognized as a fair exponent of our national principles, it is our martyr-president Abraham Lincoln; whom Lowell calls, in his noble Commemoration Ode at Cambridge,-- "New birth of our new soil, the first American." What President Lincoln's political principle was, we know. On his journey to Washington for his first inauguration he said, "I have never had a feeling that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." To find out what was his view of those sentiments, we must go back several years earlier, and consider that remarkable letter of his to the Boston Republicans who had invited him to join them in celebrating Jefferson's birthday, in April, 1859. It was well called by Charles Sumner "a gem in political literature;" and it seems to me almost as admirable, in its way, as the Gettysburg address. "The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another bluntly styles them 'self-evident lies.' And others insidiously argue that they apply only to 'superior races.'" "These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect,--the subverting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned
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