mpaign
orators, continually falling back to the old ground, are bundles
of contradictions on this vital question. Inasmuch as we are,
first, citizens of the United States, and second, of the State
wherein we reside, the primal rights of all citizens should be
regulated by the national government, and complete equality in
civil and political rights everywhere secured. When women are
denied the right to enter institutions of learning, and practice
in the professions, unjust discriminations made against sex even
more degrading and humiliating than were ever made against color,
surely woman, too, should be protected by a civil-rights bill and
a sixteenth amendment that should make her political status equal
with all other citizens of the republic.

The right of suffrage, like the currency of the post-office
department, demands national regulation. We can all remember the
losses sustained by citizens in traveling from one State to
another under the old system of State banks. We can imagine the
confusion if each State regulated its post-offices, and the
transit of the mails across its borders. The benefits we find in
uniformity and unity in these great interests would pervade all
others where equal conditions were secured. Some citizens are
asking for a national bankrupt law, that a person released from
his debts in one State may be free in every other. Some are for a
religious freedom amendment that shall forever separate church
and State; forbidding a religious test as a condition of suffrage
or a qualification for office; forbidding the reading of the
Bible in the schools and the exempting of church property and
sectarian institutions of learning or charity from taxation. Some
are demanding a national marriage law, that a man legally married
in one State may not be a bigamist in another. Some are asking a
national prohibitory law, that a reformed drunkard who is
shielded from temptation in one State may not be environed with
dangers in another. And thus many individual interests point to a
growing feeling among the people in favor of homogeneous
legislation. As several of the States are beginning to legislate
on the woman suffrage question, it is of vital moment that there
should be some national action.

As the laws now are, a woman who c