n. The
executive committee has felt the cramping influence of an
unfriended treasury. Its provision has been the fruit of
unwearied soliciting, and should the especial object of the
association ever be accomplished, the honors of success may be
fitly contested by the fine art of begging.

The following report was sent us by Mrs. Mary Byrnes:

March 22, 1872, the Citizens' Suffrage Association of
Philadelphia was formed, William Morris Davis, president, with
fifty members. The name of the society was chosen to denote the
view of its members as to the basis of the elective franchise.
The amendments to the United States constitution had clearly
defined who were citizens, and shown citizenship to be without
sex. Woman was as indisputably a citizen as man. Whatever rights
he possessed as a citizen she possessed also. The supreme law of
the land placed her on the same plane of political rights with
him. If man held the right of suffrage as a citizen of the United
States, either by birthright within the respective States, or by
naturalization under the United States, then the right of the
female citizen to vote was as absolute as that of the male
citizen; and woman's disfranchisement became a wrong inflicted
upon her by usurped power. Men became voters by reason of their
citizenship, having first complied with certain police
regulations imposed within and by the respective States. The
Citizens' Suffrage Association demanded the same political rights
for all citizens, nothing more, nothing less. It repudiated the
idea that one class of citizens should ask of another class
rights which that other class never possessed, and which those
who were denied them never had lost. This society held that the
right to give implied the right to take away; and further, that
the right to give implied a right lodged somewhere in society,
which society had never acquired by any direct concession from
the people.

This society held also, that the theory of the right to the
franchise, as a gift, bore with it the power somewhere to
restrict the male citizen's suffrage, and to strike at the
principle of self-government. They had seen this doctrine
earnestly advanced. They knew that there was a growing class in
the country who were inimical to universal suffrage. I