Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
I wish to say further that there is no connection whatever
between jury service and the right of suffrage. The question as
to who shall perform jury service, who shall perform military
service, who shall perform civil official duty, is certainly a
matter to be regulated by the community itself; but the question
of the right to participate in the formation of a government
which controls the life, the property and the destinies of its
citizens, I contend is one which goes back of these mere
regulations for the protection of property and the punishment of
offenses under the laws. It is a matter of right which it is a
tyranny to refuse to any citizen demanding it.
Now, Mr. President, I shall close by saying, God speed the day
when not only in all the States of the Union and in all the
Territories, but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law
freed from the last shackle which has been riveted upon her by
tyranny and the last disability which has been imposed upon her
by ignorance--not only in respect to the right of suffrage but in
every other respect the peer and equal of her brother, man.
Senator Vest then entered into a long and elaborate discussion of the
resolution, in which he said:
Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects popular
government based on _the will of the people as expressed through
their suffrage_ is not only important but vitally so. If this
government which is based on _the intelligence of the people_,
shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature or
corrupt suffrage. If the Ship of State launched by our fathers
shall ever be destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of
universal, unprepared suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be
taken away. Legislatures and conventions may do everything else;
they never can do that. When any particular class or portion of
the community is once invested with this privilege _it is fixed,
accomplished and eternal_.[52]
The Senator who spoke last on this question refers to the
successful experiment in regard to woman suffrage in the
Territories of Wyoming and Washington. It is not upon the plains
of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman
suffrage can be tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and
sparsely-settled regions of this country must from the very
nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else. The
danger of corrupt suffrage is in the cities, and those masses of
population to which civilization tends everywhere in all history.
Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large
cities? Where are the localities in which the strain upon popular
government must come?
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