We ask for a sixteenth amendment because your honorable body, the Congress of the United States, has power to submit the proposition to the legislatures of the several States, and it is much easier to canvass a legislature-it is much easier to persuade the members of a legislature to pass on the ratification of this amendment than it is to get the whole three millions or six millions, as the case may be, of the rank and file of the men of the different States to vote for it.

I appeal to you that you bring this question before the Senate of the United States. I think we are of as much importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and all of the different sorts of men that you have before you. [Laughter.] When you get those men, you have an ignorant and unlettered set of people, who know nothing about our institutions.

The 600 women teachers sent over to the Philippines are a thousand times better qualified than are the men who go there to make money. The women go there to teach, to educate, and to get something to build a State upon.

The women of the islands, as well as the women at home, are quite as well qualified to govern and have the charge of affairs in their hands as are the men.

But I do not propose to talk this morning. I am simply here to introduce those who are to address you.

I have here the report of the hearing two years ago, which contains a statement of the workings of suffrage in the different States of the Union. This report is published at the expense of Uncle Sam. The only thing we ever get out of him is the printing of that document. [Laughter.] This bears the frank of Hon. Cushman K. Davis, and during his lifetime these reports were sent over the country in that way. Before that the reports of these hearings were sent out under the frank of Senator Daniel, former chairman of the committee, and we shall expect Senator Bacon and Senator Berry and all of you gentlemen to do your part. Senator Mitchell here is an old war horse. I traveled with him thirty-one years ago over the Union Pacific, and we were snowed in together for nine days. [Laughter.]

Senator MITCHELL. We got pretty well acquainted then, did we not? Miss ANTHONY. Yes; and you have been a good suffrage man ever since.

Senator MITCHELL. You made one convert.

Miss ANTHONY. Yes; and there were several others. A man came to me at the hotel the other night, who was with us on that trip, who remembered the trials we had.

I now have the pleasure of introducing Harriet May Mills, the organizer of New York State.

STATEMENT OF MISS HARRIET MAY MILLS.

Miss MILLS. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I speak this morning as a taxpayer, in behalf of the great principle that taxation without representation is tyranny; not because I believe that the only women who should vote are those who are taxed, but because I believe that taxpaying women suffer an added injustice, since they are not only governed by laws which they can not help to make, but because they also are obliged to pay taxes while they are powerless to levy.

This great principle, of course, is not a new one to us. But there are people in these days who say that all those great declarations of the fathers are outgrown. It seems to me we do not realize that the women of to-day are much larger shareholders in the Government than they have ever been before, and we can not certainly believe that the principles for which our fathers died will ever be outgrown.

In my State of New York we tried a few years ago to make a list of the taxpaying women, and although it was necessarily more or less imperfect, we found that outside of New York City, in three-fourths of the towns and villages of the State, the women paid taxes on $369,000,000. I notice in the press a statement somebody has made lately that the women of New York State pay taxes on over $100,000,000. They must certainly pay taxes on three or four times as much as that. In one city, near my own home, a recent investigation has been made, and we find there that women pay as much as one-half, that they are assessed on $5,032,476 real and personal property, and that they also own a great deal of stock in the banks and other large corporations.

Of 88 stockholders in one national bank in that city, 50 are women; so that it is fair to estimate that the women pay at least one-half of the taxes, and I believe that this city is not exceptional in my State.

The other day in our convention we took a vote to determine the number of women present who paid taxes. All who paid taxes were asked to rise, and out of some 300 women all save 20 rose, showing the great proportion of women who to-day are directly assisting in the support of the Government. This is largely due, of course, to two great influences: First, the fact that women can now own property, whether married or single.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century no married woman could own a cent of property. At the beginning of the twentieth century women, married or single, may own and often do own millions.

In Chicago the largest schedules of personal tax that were filed recently were filed by two women, Mrs. Emmons Blaine and Mrs. Mary Sturgis. I suppose that does not mean that they necessarily had the largest amount of personal property, but they confessed to all they had. [Laughter.]

Then another reason for this large increase in the property of women is that they are now allowed to earn their own living in almost any business, and there are to-day at least 4,000,000 of us earning independent incomes. We feel that it is a great injustice, gentlemen, when we are such large shareholders in the Government, when we are such large participants in business affairs, to be denied any voice in the Government.

It was quite different in the old days, when married women were always under tutelage and had no rights of their own, when they did not even own the clothes they wore. There might have been a little more justice in giving the votes to the man and denying it to the woman, but certainly it can not be fair to-day.

Some people say that this property is all represented by the men, and that they cast the votes for us. Gentlemen, in my State of New York there are 40,000 more women than men; and is it not a great burden to put upon the men to ask them to represent not only themselves, but 40,000 more women than the double of themselves?

I do not see how it is possible for any man to represent a woman. In Belgium I believe they have a law which gives a married man two

votes, but we have no such law in our country; and even that law does not stipulate that the second vote shall always express the opinion of the wife. So that even there a man does not usually represent his wife.

In our constitutional convention, in 1894, we had a glaring instance of the way men sometimes represent their wives. There was a woman there who was very much interested in the amendment which we hoped to have submitted, striking the word "male" from the State constitution. She was very much interested all through the campaign, and on the night when the vote was taken was very much excited lest her husband should not express her opinion. He expressed it by voting the other way. [Laughter.] And I am quite sure that men very often express their wives' opinions in that way. It is quite right that they should express their own opinions and not those of their wives.

We are not asking this because we are women or because we want anything that is not justly ours; but we are asking justice for the excluded class, which now happens to be women, in this country.

the

The principle that taxation and representation are inseparable is being taught very well to the children in a little republic in our Statethe George Junior Republic. There they are trying to institute a true republic among these young boys and girls. A few years ago girls thought, as some women think to-day, that they did not wish to vote, and there was a boy running for president who was very much opposed to the enfranchisement of the girls, and he said: "It would be unwomanly for you to vote. You do not wish to vote, do you?" And somebody foolishly said they did not. But a little while afterwards a tax was levied, and the girls found that they were taxed much more heavily in the republic than the boys, and then they began to open their eyes, and they thought if it was womanly for a girl to pay her taxes, and to pay such heavy taxes, it might be womanly for her to vote and decide what the taxes should be. That is the justice we ask at your hands to-day; and I say there can be no reason for denying to public shareholders the same rights that we give to private shareholders in all the corporations of this country.

People say this principle is dead, that it is outgrown, but, gentlemen, our forefathers did not believe that. There was once a man named John Hampden, and when he was called to pay a tax unjustly levied he said, "No, gentlemen, I would be content to loan my King, but I fear to call down upon my head the curses pronounced in Magna Charta against anyone who thus broke or disregarded its provisions." He was rewarded by imprisonment in the tower, and the old chronicler says that never again did he look the man he was before.

Such patriots had our country of old, and we stand here to-day the lineal descendants of such men and many another. We are the true daughters of the Revolution, who believe to-day as our forefathers believed, and as they fought and died to prove, that taxation without representation is unjust. [Applause.]

Miss ANTHONY. The next in order will be Mrs. Lucretia L. Blankenburg, daughter of Dr. Hannah Longshore, who was the first woman that was graduated as a physician in Philadelphia. Mrs. Blankenburg is the president of the State society of Pennsylvania.

STATEMENT OF MRS. LUCRETIA L. BLANKENBURG.

Mrs. BLANKENBURG. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, my theme to-day will be the home. I am a home maker. All through song and story we read of woman as the queen of the home, where she reigns supreme. Now, in fact, she is the sharer of the home. Therefore politics enters the home. It enters through the water department, and the more corrupt the politics the dirtier the water. [Laughter.] I live in Philadelphia, gentlemen, and I am very familiar with the subject. Politics enters the home through the gas pipes and along the electric wires. It also enters the home through the doors and windows, in the form of dust. The poor asphalt pavements that we have are very manifest, as are also the neglected streets.

Municipal housekeeping is simply homekeeping on a larger scale. Men do not make a special study of housekeeping, yet it is our experience that men are elected to take charge of a whole city of homes. Now, what we wish to do is to take the home into politics. The ward in which I live in the city of Philadelphia is in the center of the city, and to find out how many of our own members are interested in taking the home into politics we have made a house-to-house canvass. have a population of about 20,000 inhabitants in that ward, and a very remarkable fact in our locality is that we have more men than women; and at the last election in November more than half of the male population in our ward voted!

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We visited 1,227 homes of women in this ward and interviewed them, and we found a great many, of course, that have no opinions on these subjects, and we found some that did not care to express their opinion, for, they said to the canvasser, "We belong to the gang and we are not going to talk to you on this subject." Then we had others that had never thought about it and were not interested, but over 50 per cent of these women were interested in the politics that come into their homes, and most of them who expressed an opinion said they thought women should serve on the school boards and on the health boards.

We hope to follow this matter up and hold meetings from time to time in this ward, and educate these women to help make our city a cleaner and better place in which to live.

Now, gentlemen, we not only want to take the home into the city politics, but we want to take it into the State and national assemblies. This would not be a strange precedent. I read the other day in Gurden's Antiquities of Parliament that during the reign of Edward III no less than ten women had writs served upon them to serve as members of the Parliament. They were peeresses, and I suppose received this honor on account of their birth. But we are all peeresses in America, and we are ready and anxious to sit in the parliament of the nation. [Applause.]

Miss ANTHONY. I now introduce Rev. Olympia Brown, a regularly ordained minister, and president of the Wisconsin State society.

STATEMENT OF REV. OLYMPIA BROWN.

Rev. OLYMPIA BROWN. Gentlemen of the committee, I do not come to make any special plea in behalf of women or to ask any particular favors for them, nor even to speak of the awful iniquity and the gross

wickedness of making women pay the bills and submit to a government in which they have no voice; but I come rather to speak in the interest of the State itself, the rulers of the State, the men of the nation, and especially the Congressmen.

I ask your attention to the fact that in the consideration of any great subject it is not enough to take observations from a single point of view. You remember the story of the two knights who fought about the color of a shield, one saying it was red and the other that it was white. After they had fought about it for a long time, each looked on the other side and found that the shield was both white and red. Now, as I understand it, you gentlemen who are ruling the country are looking only on one side of the shield, and that is the red side. Will you not look upon the white side also? [Applause.] Will you not bring in testimony from both sides?

I am told that when our astronomers wish to determine the distance of any heavenly body, they take a great number of observations from a great number of points, and then they compare and collate, and the result of this comparison and collation gives them the true position of the subject which they are studying. Now, when you have before you any great question of importance, you need to take observations from different sides.

Woman has a different standpoint, a different point of view from that of man.

Even if we should admit, as some claim, that the masculine and the feminine souls, or brains, or minds, or spirits are all alike, nevertheless, the different experiences of life, the different positions they occupy, give them still a different point of view from that of men, and you want both points of view in order to get the whole well-rounded truth.

But women are different from men. As Mr. Finck well says, there is sex in mind. They approach every subject from a different side. They view it from a different standpoint, and in order to get the truth you must have woman's testimony as well as man's testimony. She must speak out of experience, out of the soul life which has been given to her, and that will be the necessary supplement to man's observation. Wise men tell us that woman is intuition and man is reason. Very good. Why not have both? A little intuition in our legislative bodies would save an immense amount of time and cut a vast deal of red tape, and I think we need it and I believe anyone thinks so who has ever had anything to do with any kind of legislative process.

We need both observations, and then, having the best thought of man, supplemented by the best thought of woman, we shall get the truth on the great subjects that are to be acted upon by our legislators. You may say, perhaps, that you get woman's thought from her conversation and through her writing, but you do not. You can not get her thought in that way any more than you can breathe the morning air through two thicknesses of cheesecloth. You prefer to go out into the air and take it at first hand. Now, when you take a woman's opinion or her observation, percolating though pages of dusty print paper, or through the report of the men with whom she converses, you have not her opinion; you have only a dull, dim, blurred photograph of what her opinon is. You can only get her opinion when she gives it at first hand through the ballot.

The human being is twofold, masculine and feminine. The masculine