the political inferiors of all the men, no matter how base born, how
stupid, how ignorant, how brutal, how poverty-stricken. This anomaly is
the real innovation. Men have personally ruled the women of their
families; the law has annihilated the separate existence of women; but
women have never been subjected to the political sovereignty of all men
simply in virtue of their sex. Never, that is, since the days of the
ancient republics." Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick, who, as Secretary of the
New-England Suffrage Association, was put forward to meet all comers,
writing in July, 1895, said: "Shall we, as a people, be true to our
principles and enfranchise woman? or, shall we drift along in the meanest
form of oligarchy known among men--an oligarchy which exalts every sort of
a male into a ruler simply because he is a male, and debases every woman
into a subject simply because she is a woman?" Mrs. Fanny B. Ames,
speaking in Boston in 1896, said: "I believe woman suffrage to be the
final result of the evolution of a true democracy." Not only has every
woman speaker or writer in favor of suffrage presented this idea in some
form, but the men also who have taken that side have done likewise. One
among those who advocated the cause before the Committee in the
Constitutional Convention of New York, said: "Woman Suffrage is the
inevitable result of the logic of the situation of modern society. The
despot who first yielded an inch of power gave up the field. We are
standing in the light of the best interests of the State of New York when
we stand in the way of this forward movement."

All these writers charge the American Republic with being false to
democratic principles in excluding women from the franchise, while but one
of them alludes to the fact that in the ancient republics the same
"anomaly" was seen.

As I read political history, the facts go to show that the fundamental