ation of this reform, propositions to extend the
right of suffrage to women have been submitted to the popular vote
in Kansas, Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska and Oregon, and lost by
large majorities in all; while, by a simple act of legislature,
Wyoming, Utah and Washington territories have enfranchised their
women without going through the slow process of a constitutional
amendment. In New York, the State that has led this movement, and
in which there has been a more continued agitation than in any
other, we are now pressing on the legislature the consideration
that it has the same power to extend the right of suffrage to women
that it has so often exercised in enfranchising different classes
of men.

Eminent publicists have long conceded this power to State
legislatures as well as to congress, declaring that women as
citizens of the United States have the right to vote, and that a
simple enabling act is all that is needed. The constitutionality of
such an act was never questioned until the legislative power was
invoked for the enfranchisement of women. We who have studied our
republican institutions and understand the limits of the executive,
judicial and legislative branches of the government, are aware that
the legislature, directly representing the people, is the primary
source of power, above all courts and constitutions. Research into
the early history of this country shows that in line with English
precedent, women did vote in the old colonial days and in the
original thirteen States of the Union. Hence we are fully awake to
the fact that our struggle is not for the attainment of a new
right, but for the restitution of one our fore-mothers possessed
and exercised.

All thoughtful readers must close these volumes with a deeper sense
of the superior dignity, self-reliance and independence that belong
by nature to woman, enabling her to rise above such multifarious
persecutions as she has encountered, and with persistent
self-assertion to maintain her rights. In the history of the race
there has been no struggle for liberty like this. Whenever the
interest of the ruling classes has induced them to confer new
rights on a subject class, it has been done with no effort on the
part of the latter. Neither the American slave nor the English
laborer demanded the right of suffrage. It was given in both cases
to strengthen the liberal party. The philanthropy of the few may
have entered into those reforms, but political ex