citizen of the republic.

But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel I went to
the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to vote,
the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them--they appealed to me,
and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Putting sex
where he did color, Senator Sumner would have said:

Qualifications can not be in their nature permanent or
insurmountable. Sex can not be a qualification any more than size,
race, color or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or
insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the
suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without
representation, against which our Revolutionary mothers, as well as
fathers, rebelled.

For any State to make sex a qualification, which must ever result in the
disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of
attainder, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the
supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever
withheld from women and their female posterity. For them, this
government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed.
For them this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is
the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe.
An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of
learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy
of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this
oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the
oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every
household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects--carries
discord and rebellion into every home of the nation. This most odious
aristocracy exists, too, in the face of Section 4, Article IV, which
says: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a
republican form of government."

What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the inhabitants
of a monarchical and those of a republican form of government, save that
in the monarchical the people are subjects, helpless, powerless, bound
to obey laws made by political superiors; while in the republican the
people are citizens, individual sovereigns, all clothed with equal power
to make and unmake both their laws and law-makers? The moment you
d