who goes to a life of degradation and pollution shedding burning
tears over her 4-cent shirts.

We ask for the ballot for the good of the race, Huxley says,
"admitting for the sake of argument that woman is the weaker,
mentally and physically, for that reason she should have the
ballot and should have every help that the world can give her."
When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the
purity, the spirituality, and the love of woman then those
legislative halls and those councils are apt to become coarse and
brutal, God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a
better land, and by our love and our intellect to help to make our
country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must
have states we men to bear them.

I ask you also for the ballot that I may decide what I am. I
stand before you, but I do not know to-day whether I am legally a
"person" according to the law. It has been decided in some States
that we are not "persons." In the State of New York, in one
village, it was decided that women are not inhabitants. So I
should like to know whether I am a person, whether I am an
inhabitant, and above all I ask you for the ballot that I may
become a citizen of this great Republic.

Gentlemen, you see before you this great convention of women from
the Atlantic slopes to the Pacific Ocean, from the North to the
South. We are in dead earnest. A reform never goes backward. This
is a question that is before the American nation. Will you do your
duty and give us our liberty, or will you leave it for braver
hearts to do what must be done? For, like our forefathers, we will