, or children by a prior marriage--legally divested of any
claim on her or the husband who absorbs her personal services and
earnings--are sent to the poor-house, or pine in bitter
privation; except with consent of her husband, she can give
neither her personal care nor the avails of her industry, for
their benefit. So, to be a wife, woman ceases, in law, to be
anything else--yields up the ghost of a legal existence! That she
escapes the extreme penalty of her legal bonds in any case is
due to the fact that the majority of men, married or single, are
notably better than their laws.

Our fathers taught the quality and initiated the form of free
government. But it was left to their posterity to learn from the
discipline of experience, that truths, old as the eternities, are
forever revealing new phases to render possible more perfect
interpretations; and to accumulate unanswerable reasons for their
extended application. That the sorest trials and most appreciable
failures of the government our fathers bequeathed, to us, have
been the direct and inevitable results of their departures from
the principles they enunciated, is so patent to all Christendom,
that free government itself has won from our mistakes material to
revolutionize the world--lessons that compel depotisms to change
their base and constitutional monarchies to make broader the
phylacteries of popular rights.

Is it not meet then, that on this one-hundredth anniversary of
American independence the daughters of revolutionary sires should
appeal to the sons to fulfill what the fathers promised but
failed to perform--should appeal to them as the constituted
executors of the father's will, to give full practical effect to
the self-evident truths, that "taxation without representation is
tyranny"--that "governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed"? With an evident common interest in all
the affairs of which government properly or improperly takes
cognizance, we claim enfranchisement on the broad ground of human
right, having proved the justice of our claim by the injustice
which has resulted to us and ours through our disfranchisement.

We ask enfranchisement in the abiding faith that with our
cooeperative efforts free government would attain to higher
av