Government formally asked the assistance of its woman citizens, they
showed their consent by their deeds, and only the suffrage faction treated
the invitation to share in the Exposition after the immemorial fashion of
a discontented element. And the Suffragists themselves consent to be
governed every time they accept the protection of the law or invoke it
against a debtor; for they thereby acknowledge its proper application to
themselves if the case were reversed.

The second count in the list of political grievances runs: "He has
compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no
voice." This was not true, for the women who wrote that sentence were free
to use their voices in regard to every law they desired to affect, and
circumstances have proved that they were sure of being heard, and, if the
law were just, and for the general good, of assisting materially to
establish it. At the very time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott were writing that indictment against the United States Government,
Dorothea Dix was presenting a memorial to the National Congress asking for
an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to
endow hospitals for the indigent insane. That bill failed to pass, but in
1850 another bill, which she presented, asking for ten millions of acres,
passed the House and failed in the Senate merely for want of time to
consider it. Four years later a bill making appropriations of the ten
millions of acres to the separate States passed both houses, and President
Pierce vetoed it, because he believed the general Government had no
constitutional power to make such appropriations. She then went to the
Legislatures of the States, with the result that is so well known. Rhode
Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, and North
Carolina founded lunatic asylums, and the work was begun which is
culminating in the separation of the insane from the criminal, the women
from the men, in every town and county of the land. The right of petition