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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

Article XV says: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

In the Constitution of the United States the word female or she does not occui ( once. By man is meant an individual of the human race, a human being, a person, the human race, mankind, the totality of men. And God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion.”

Let whom have dominion? The male and female man.

In the constitution of Michigan the word she does not occur, and the word female is used once in connection with special property rights.

Now, if all this declaration and preamble concerning the rights and privileges of “ citizens,” “ people” and “ persons ” do not include women, then it follows that any duties, requirements, obligations or penalties which the law lays on citizens, people and persons do not include women. It cannot mean women to be taxed as a citizen or person, but not represented as the same. Our martyred Abraham Lincoln said, “ I believe in all who bear the burdens of the government sharing in its privileges, by nc means excluding the women.”

“ We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, promote the genei'al welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States.” If by “ we, the people,” women are not meant, then, as a logical sequence, women are relieved from all responsibility and all allegiance to a government whose powers are not derived from the consent of the governed What a farce is a government with such a preamble and declaration of principles, excluding one-half of the people from the right of self-protection, excluding one-half of the people from the right of self- government, and holding them amenable to laws made by others, taking by force their property to uphold the government and maintain the law, to pay the salaries of representatives whom they did not elect; to fine, arrest, imprison or hang them for not obeying laws made without their consent.

“A government by the people, of the people and for the people,” which holds women as people and citizens, to bear its burdens, to be punished by its laws, but excluded from its privileges and immunities, is a government of robbery and usur­pation.

In the settlement of new countries, while the railroads are being built; while the mountains are being tunneled and the mines developed; while the community is largely composed of men and that vanguard of civilization, the saloon, is the only pub­lic school, the depravity of men is appalling, the spirit of recklessness runs riot; gradually the wives and mothers come; the home is established, the little church is built, the primitive school springs up in lonely places, and slowly and surely a change of thought, habit and higher aims permeates that community; but that half of the people who maintain the church, who are self-supporting, law-abiding and aspire to noble deeds, are excluded from the citizen’s right to the ballot, that instrument which makes and shapes the conditions and environments of home.

The one who aims to be self-supporting; who holds inviolate the rights of his neighbor; who succors the friendless, encourages and sustains the weak; who seeks to promote industry, economy, thrift; who cherishes a spirit of charity and forbear­ance: who stimulates a desire for high thinking, pure living and broad culture; who would suppress and eliminate the depraving influences of obscene literature, the base in art, the demoralization of gambling, the body and soul destroying cancer of prosti­tution, that poisons the blood and perpetuates its pestilential life by bringing into being helpless children, cursed from their conception and birth by vitiated blood and inherited tendencies to evil; who would wipe out that prolific breeder of poverty, pauperism and misery—the saloon, with all its glitter, greed and groveling, is the