Our statistics are lamentably meager in information as to the status of our women outside their mere enumeration, but we learn that in a single State 42,000 are assessed and pay one-eleventh of the total burden of taxation, with no voice in its disbursements. From the imperfect gleaning of the Tenth Census we learn that of the total enumerated bread-winners of the United States more than one-seventh are women.... That these 2,647,157 citizens of whom we have official information labor from necessity and are everywhere underpaid is within the knowledge and observation of every Senator upon this floor. Only the Government makes any pretense of paying women in accordance with the labor performed--without submitting them to the competition of their starving sisters, whose natural dignity and self-respect have suffered from being driven by the fierce pressure of want into the few and crowded avenues for the exchange of their labor for bread. Is it not the highest exhibit of the moral superiority of our women that so very few consent to exchange pinching penury for gilded vice? Will the possession of the ballot multiply and widen these avenues to self-support and independence? The most thoughtful women who have given the subject thorough examination believe it, and I can not but infer that many men, looking only to their own selfish interests, fear it. History teaches that every class which has assumed political responsibility has been materially elevated and improved thereby, and I can not believe that the rule would have an exception in the women of to-day. I do not say that to the idealized women so generally described by obstructionists--the dainty darlings whose prototypes are to be found in the heroines of Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper--immediate awakening would come; but to the toilers, the wage-workers and the women of affairs, the consequent enlargement of possibilities would give new courage and stimulate to new endeavor, and the State would be the gainer thereby.