Dr. Jacobi, in her address before the Constitutional Convention, said: "Still, all women do not demand the suffrage. We are sometimes told that the thousands of women who do want the suffrage must wait until those who are now indifferent, or even hostile, can be converted from their position. Gentlemen, we declare that theory is preposterous. It is true that the exercise of an independent sovereignty necessitates the demonstration of a very considerable amount of independence. A rebel state that cannot break its own blockade may not call upon a foreign power to move from its neutrality to do so. But the demand for equal suffrage is in nowise analogous to a claim for independent sovereignty. It is rather analogous to the claim to the protection of existing laws, which any group of people, or even a single person, may make." Under a democratic government a claim for equal suffrage is a claim to share the independent sovereignty that protects, and therefore it cannot be analogous to a claim for protection, individual or otherwise, under that sovereignty. Does Dr. Jacobi mean that in asking for suffrage she does not ask to be as much an independent sovereign as any masculine voter of them all? The comparison of woman's claims to suffrage to the protection afforded by existing laws, suggests a narrowing of the demand to fit the requirements of an apparently hopeless struggle for a majority vote of women. The Government is spoken of by Suffragists as if it were something exterior to and apart from the individual voters--a code of laws that had been set going and would run of itself, the laws being changed by more or fewer votes, but the power to execute being automatic and continuous. As this is the opposite of the actual situation, these rebels will have to "break their own blockade" like any others. The "pacific blocade" that is enforced by the Quaker guns of this movement has its peaceful war-cries. One of the most exultant is an allusion to the expression "We the people" in the preamble of our national Constitution, with the question whether "people" does not include women. A reading of the entire preamble shows that, of the six achievements there specified as the purpose of the Constitution, every one is a thing that only men can do--with the possible exception of the fifth, which proposes rather vaguely to "promote the general welfare."