金融英语保险语证卷业务相关辅导35
On the StumpAnthony saw the four months until her trial as an opportunity to educate the citizens of Rochester and surrounding counties on the issue of women suffrage.She took to the stump, speaking in town after town on the topic, "Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?"
By mid-May, Anthony's exhausting lecture tour had taken her to every one of the twenty-nine post-office districts in Monroe County.To many in her audience, Anthony was the picture of "sophisticated refinement and sincerity."The fifty-two-year-old suffragist delivered her earnest speeches dressed in a gray silk dress a white lace collar.Her smoothed hair was twisted neatly into a tight knot.She would look at her audience, ranging from a few dozen to over a hundred persons, and begin:
Friends and Fellow-citizens: I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.
In her address, Anthony quoted the Declaration of Independence, the U. S. Constitution, the New York Constitution, James Madison, Thomas Paine, the Supreme Court, and several of the leading Radical Republican senators of the day to support her contention that women had a legal right as citizens to vote.She argued that natural law, as well as a proper interpretation of the Civil War Amendments, gave women the power to vote, as in this passage suggesting that women, having been in a state of servitude, were enfranchised by the recently enacted Fifteenth Amendment extending the vote to ex-slaves:
And yet one more authority; that of Thomas Paine, than whom not one of the Revolutionary patriots more ably vindicated the principles upon which our government is founded:
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce man to a state of slavery; for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another; and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case...."
Is anything further needed to prove woman's condition of servitude sufficiently orthodox to entitle her to the guaranties of the fifteenth amendment? Is there a man who will not agree with me, that to talk of freedom without the ballot, is mockery--is slavery--to the women of this Republic, precisely as New England's orator Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war, declared it to be to the newly emancipated black men?
Anthony ended her hour-long lectures by frankly attempting to influence potential jurors to vindicate her in her upcoming trial:
We appeal to the women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right to vote." We appeal to the inspectors of elections everywhere to receive the votes of all United States citizens as it is their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals to arrest the inspectors who reject the names and votes of United States citizens, as it is their duty to do, and leave those alone who, like our eighth ward inspectors, perform their duties faithfully and well.
We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of "guilty" against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections. Or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors of elections, for receiving and counting such citizens votes.
We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that "the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human right unconstitutional."
页:
[1]