sement of women.

Then, in addition to all these, there are, as you know, a few
religious bigots left in the world who really believe that somehow
or other if women are allowed to vote St. Paul would feel badly
about it. I do not know but that some of the gentlemen present
belong to that class. [Laughter.] So, when you put those best men
of the nation, having religion about everything except on this one
question, whose prejudices control them, with all this vast mass
of ignorant, uneducated, degraded population in this country,
you make an overwhelming and insurmountable majority against the
enfranchisement of women.

It is because of this fact that I ask you not to remand us back
to the States, but to submit to the States the proposition of a
sixteenth amendment. The popular-vote method is not only of itself
an impossibility, but it is too humiliating a process to compel
the women of this nation to submit to any longer.

I am going to give you an illustration, not because I have any
disrespect for the person, because on many other questions he was
really a good deal better than a good many other men who had not
so bad a name in this nation. When, under the old _regime_, John
Morrissey, of my State, the king of gamblers, was a Representative
on the floor of Congress, it was humiliating enough for Lucretia
Mott, for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for all of us to come down here
to Washington and beg at the feet of John Morrissey that he would
let intelligent, native-born women vote, and let us have as much
right in this Government and in the government of the city of New
York as he had. When John Morrissey was a member of the New York
State Legislature it would have been humiliating enough for us to
go to the New York State Legislature and pray of John Morrissey to
vote to ratify the sixteenth amendment, giving to us a right to
vote; but if instead of a sixteenth amendment you tell us to go
back to the popular-vote method, the old-time method, and go down
into John Morrissey's seventh Congressional district in the city
of New York, and there, in the sloughs and slums of that great
Sodom, in the grog-shops, the gambling-houses, and the brothels,
beg at the feet of each individual fisticuff of his constituency
to give the noble, educated, native-born, tax-paying women of
the State