Few people comprehend the length and breadth of the principle we are advocating to-day, and how closely it is allied to everything vital in our system of government. Our personal grievances, such as being robbed of property and children by unjust husbands; denied admission into the colleges, the trades and professions; compelled to work at starving prices, by no means round out this whole question. In asking for a sixteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, and the protection of congress against the injustice of State law, we are fighting the same battle as Jefferson and Hamilton fought in 1776, as Calhoun and Clay in 1828, as Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in 1860, namely, the limit of State rights and federal power. The enfranchisement of woman involves the same vital principle of our government that is dividing and distracting the two great political parties at this hour. There is nothing a foreigner coming here finds it so difficult to understand as the wheel within a wheel in our national and State governments, and the possibility of carrying them on without friction; and this is the difficulty and danger we are fast finding out. The recent amendments are steps in the right direction toward national unity, securing equal rights to all citizens, in every latitude and longitude. But our congressional debates, judicial decisions, and the utterances of campaign orators, continually falling back to the old ground, are bundles of contradictions on this vital question. Inasmuch as we are, first, citizens of the United States, and second, of the State wherein we reside, the primal rights of all citizens should be regulated by the national government, and complete equality in civil and political rights everywhere secured. When women are denied the right to enter institutions of learning, and practice in the professions, unjust discriminations made against sex even more degrading and humiliating than were ever made against color, surely woman, too, should be protected by a civil-rights bill and a sixteenth amendment that should make her political status equal with all other citizens of the republic.