I shall never forget how our hearts sank when in 1871 that decision came, declaring the powerlessness of the Federal Constitution to protect women in their civil right of being eligible to the legal profession. When we said if these rights which it is meant to protect are not civil they must be political rights, we thought we had the Supreme Court in a corner. But when my trial for voting came on, Justice Hunt said that the right to vote was a special right belonging to men alone. We didn't believe that this decision could be confirmed, but it was, when Mrs. Minor, who attempted to vote at the same election in her State of Missouri, appealed her case to the Supreme Court of the United States. It was argued by her husband, the ablest of lawyers, and when the Judges brought in their decision it was to the effect that the Constitution of the United States has no voters. Thus it is that we have two Supreme Court decisions relative to the powers of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect women, and in both cases they have been excluded absolutely from its provisions. I remember, Mrs. Minor (turning to that lady), how we discussed these questions in those early years. We weren't sleepy in our talk as we were being cut off inch by inch from the protection of the Constitution. I remember how Mrs. Stanton said in a public address: "If you continue to deny to women the protection of this amendment, you will finally come to the point when it will cease to protect even black men," and we have lived to see that day. The address on The Coming Sex by Mrs. Eliza Archard Connor, a well-known journalist of New York, was declared by the press to be in its delivery "the gem of the convention." She said in part: It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race. They have keener sympathies and quicker intuitions than men. They have a gift of language that not even their worst enemies will deny, and these are just the qualities which go to make the orator.... The time is coming when we shall need all our eloquence, all our intellectual power and all our love. The day is approaching when men will come with ballots in their hands, begging women to use them.... Wherever you go, wake women up, tell them to learn everything. Tell them to study with all their might history, civil government, political economy, social and industrial science--for the time is coming when they will need them all....