eprive a person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade
him from the status of a citizen of the republic to that of a subject.
It matters very little to him whether his monarch be an individual
tyrant, as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as
here in the United States; he is a powerless subject, serf or slave; not
in any sense a free and independent citizen.

It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns _he, his_ and _him_
in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to
be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the
letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the
other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from
taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the
violation of laws. There is no _she_ or _her_ or _hers_ in the tax laws,
and this is equally true of all the criminal laws.

Take for example the civil rights law which I am charged with having
violated; not only are all the pronouns in it masculine, but everybody
knows that it was intended expressly to hinder the rebel men from
voting. It reads, "If any person shall knowingly vote without _his_
having a lawful right." It was precisely so with all the papers served
on me the United States marshal's warrant, the bail-bond, the petition
for habeas corpus, the bill of indictment--not one of them had a
feminine pronoun; but to make them applicable to me, the clerk of the
court prefixed an "s" to the "he" and made "her" out of "his" and "him;"
and I insist if government officials may thus manipulate the pronouns to
tax, fine, imprison and hang women, it is their duty to thus change them
in order to protect us in our right to vote.

So long as any classes of men were denied this right, the government
made a show of consistency by exempting them from taxation. When a
property qualification of $250 was required of black men in New York,
they were not compelled to pay taxes so long as they were content to
report themselves worth less than that sum; but the moment the black
man died and his property fell to his widow or daughter, the black
woman's name was put on the assessor's list and she was compelled to pay
taxes on this same property. This also is true of ministers in New York.
So long as the minister lives, he is exempted from taxation on $1,500 of
property, but the moment the breath leaves his body, his widow's na