battles of the future must have the women in
its ranks. We are non-partisan, as has been well said by my friend
from Indiana [Mrs. Sewall.] We come Democrats, Republicans, and
Greenbackers, and I expect if there were a half dozen other
political parties some of us would belong to them. We ask this
beneficent action upon your part because we believe that the
intelligence and the justice of the hour is demanding it. We
do not want a political party action. We want you to keep this
question out of the canvass. We ask you in the name of justice and
humanity alone, and not on the part of party.

I hold in my hand a petition sent from one district in the State
of Illinois with the request that I bear it to you. Out of three
hundred electors the names of two hundred stand in this petition
that I shall leave in your hands. In this list stand not the
wife-whippers, not the drunkards, not the dissolute, but
every minister in that town, every editor in that town, every
professional man in that town, every banker, and every prominent
business man in that town of three hundred electors. I believe
that petitions could be rolled up in this way in every town in the
Northern and in many of the Southern States. I leave this petition
with you for your consideration.

Upon no question whatever has such a large number of petitions
been sent as upon this demand for woman suffrage. You have the
petitions in your hands, and I ask you in the name of justice and
humanity not to let this Congress adjourn without action.

You ask us if we are impatient. Yes; we are impatient. Some of
us may die, and I want our grand old standard-bearer, Susan B.
Anthony, whose name will go down to history beside that of George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Wendell Phillips--I want that
woman to go to heaven a free angel from this Republic. The power
lies in your hands to make us all free. May the blessing of God be
upon the hearts of every one of you, gentlemen; may the scales
of prejudice fall from your eyes, and may you, representing the
Senate of the United States, have the grand honor of telegraphing
to us, to the millions of waiting women from one end of this
country to the other, that the sixteenth amendment has been
submitted to the ratification of the several legislatures of our
States striking the word "