we are, gentlemen, but
because of what you are, and because of what we are through you,
of what you shall be through us; of what we, men and women, both
are by virtue of our heritage and our one Father, our one mother
eternal, the spirit created and progressive, that has thus far
sustained us, and that will carry us and you forward to the action
which we demand of you to take, and to the results which we
anticipate will attend upon that action.

REMARKS BY MRS. HELEN M. GOUGAR.

Miss Anthony. I think I will call upon the other representative
of the State of Indiana to speak now, Mrs. Helen M. Gougar, of
Lafayette, Ind.

Mrs. Gougar. Gentlemen, we are here on behalf of the women
citizens of this Republic, asking for political freedom. I
maintain that there is no political question paramount to that
of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day. Political
parties would fain have us believe that tariff is the great
question of the hour. Political parties know better. It is an
insult to the intelligence of the present hour to say that when
one-half of the citizens of this Republic are denied a direct
voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that tariff,
or that the civil rights of the negro, or any other question that
can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom
to women. So I come to ask you, as representative men, making laws
to govern the women the same as the men of this country (and there
is not a law that you make in the United States Congress in which
woman has not an equal interest with man), to take the word "male"
out of the constitutions of the United States and the several
States, as you have taken the word "white" out, and give to us
women a voice in the laws under which we live.

You ask me why I am inclined to be practical in my view of this
question. In the first place, speaking from my own standpoint, I
ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall
live because the older empires of the earth are sending in upon
our American shores a population drawing very largely from
the asylums, yes, from the penitentiaries, the jails, and the
poor-houses of the Old World. They are emptying those men upon
our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted with the
ballot, the law-making power in this