HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
WEDNESDAY, February 15, 1881--9 a. m.The session was opened with prayer by Rev. Mr. Freidley, of New Albany.
The reading of the Clerk's Journal was dispensed with.
NEW PROPOSITIONS.
The following described bills were introduced, read the first time, and severally referred to appropriate Committees.
By Mr. HUSTON [H. R. 879]: To authorize corporations to surrender their franchise and wind up their business, including the payment of receivers, as well as all corporate property, payments of the debts of the corporations and distribution of surplus assets. [This can be done when two-thirds of the capital stock petition such change.]
By Mr. HUSTON [H. R. 380]: To amend Section 6 of an act of 1879, to authorize cities and incorporated towns to construct, maintain and operate Water Works, and issue bonds to pay for such construction.
By Mr. GIBSON [H. R. 381]: To amend Section 48 of an act to repeal all general laws now in force for the incorporation of cities, approved March 14, 1867.
By Mr. GILLUM [H. R. 382]: To regulate the carrying of baggage and freight by Railroad, Steamboat, Express and other Companies, designating certain officers charged with the enforcement of this act, etc.
By Mr.SHIELDS [H. R. 383]: To provide for the removal of drifts from streams other than those running between two States. [When such stream becomes obstructed so as to occasion overflow, the Board of Commissioners is authorized to summons the necessary means and make such removal, such expenses to be paid by the County Treasurer to be taxed to the parties owning land where such damage would have occurred.]
By Mr. SHIELDS [H. R. 384]: To amend Section 3 of an act to organize and establish an Asylum for Feeble Minded Children--the age of admission to be between seven and twenty-five years.
Mr. MITCHELL offered a resolution that iyr Senators and Representatives in Congress be instructed and requested to use their influence toward the repeal of the navigation law which prohibits American citizens from purchasing ships built in other countries, and engaging on all foreign trade upon the high seas, or which prohibits them from registering as American ships when owned and command and officered by citizens of the United States.
Mr. LINDLAY thought this body had enough to attend to without dabbling with the affairs of the General Government, and our Reprsentatives would very likely act as they thought best, not withstanding the passage of this or similar resolutions. He could not see the propriety or necessity of instructing our Representatives in Congress. He moved to refer the resolution to the Committee on Federal Relations.
The motion was agreed to.
By Mr. KENNER [H. R. 385]: To appoint State examiners of County officers' books. [Two talented persons to be appointed by the Governor, who are well versed in book-keeping, who shall examine and investigate the condition of the books of County officials at least once every two years. Such expense to be paid out of the County Treasuries whose books are so examined.]
By Mr. KENNER [H. R. 386.]: To amend Sections 3, 6 and 9 of an act declarrtory of the law regulating marriages and enforcing the promise thereof by proper penalties; approved March 5, 1852.
By Mr. GREGORY [H. R. 387]: Creating a Board of Visitors to be known as the State Board of Visitors of the Benevolent Reformatory and Penal Institutions of the State of Indiana, fixing the term of office of such Board, prescribing the manner of organization, the amount of bonds, defining their duties, powers, etc., fixing compensation and credibility of witnesses, etc., [to consist of three gentlemen and two ladies of differ political parties, to hold office for two years.]
BILLS ON THE SECOND READING.
Pending, the introduction of bills--
The following described bills were returned from Committees with reports recommending their passage, which reports were severally concurred in:
The bill [H. R. 8] to protect the rights of children recommending its passage with amendments.
page: 191[View Page 191]The bill was laid on the table, 200 copies ordered printed, and made a special order for next Wednesday.
The bill [H. R. 249} to amend the charter of the Indianapolis Insurance Company.
The bill [H. R. 254] to amend Section 1 of the corporation of Manufacturing and Mining Companies' act of 1861.
The bill [H. R. 207] concerning articles adrift.
The bill [H. R. 290] in relation to appointing a Judge in certain cases.
The bill [S. 135] to legalize certain acts of the Board of Commmissioners of Blackford County.
The bill [H. R. 167] in relation to killing deer, etc.
The above described bills were severally ordered engrossed for the third reading.
BILLS INDEFINITELY POSTPONED
The following bills were reported from Committee with recommendation for indefinite postponement.
The bill [H. R. 258]: Amending Section 48 and 49 of general election laws.
The bill [H. R. 269] amending the general election laws.
The reports were severally concurred in.
BILLS LAID ON THE TABLE.
The bill [H. R. 171] in relation to decedent estates, and the bill [H. R. 157] on the subject of married women, were severally laid on the table by concurrence in Committee reports so recommending.
RAILROAD AND OTHER BRIDGES.
On motion by Mr. CAUTHORNE the rules were temporarily suspended and the bill [H. R. 370] supplementary to an act providing for the incorporation of Companies formed for the purpose of constructing bridges for railway and common roadway, etc., was read the second time and ordered engrossed.
WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
On motion by Mr. THOMPSON a recess of forty-five minutes was taken for the purpose of hearing the ladies, advocates of the Woman Suffrage movement speak.
Dr. Mary Haggart addressed the House as follows
GENTLEMEN OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES--I am here in behalf of the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association to present the claims of the women of this State to ask the privilege of exercising the right of self-government. I do not propose to omake any attempt whatever to bring forward anything new or startling to establish the justness of our claims. What I shall say will be princcipally a reiteration of what I have many times said before upon this question. The arguments in favor of the enfranchisement of women are truths strong and as unanswerable and old as the free institutions of our Government. It has been intimated by those inclined to sneer at this movement, that the thing of giving the Equal Suffragists a hearing before our Legislature has grown only to the proportions of a standing joke, and is a thing to be looked for as a matter of course. True statesmanship under existing conditions seems not to be a necessary ingredient in our politics, consequently the recognition of the principle of right, with an effort to apply it, may strike some as being a huge joke or a thing so novel and out of place that even gallantry is excused, should it assume the shape of martyrdom.
Gentlemen, notwithstanding the severe trials which courtesy and gallantry are ordained to pass, this question of the right of the mothers and daughters ofIndiana to say how and by whom they shall be governed "will not down." It may be moved aside this year only to confront you in still greater proportions two years hence. Notwithstanding it is declared from seemingly high sources that women have never had any political abilities, yet Government presupposes that women have the political abilities of other citizens. Government exacts from no man politically the ability to aid in its support through taxation. It exacts from women poltically the abilities to obey the laws, and suffer the penalty of violated laws and imposes upon her such political disabilities as having no right to consent to govenment, no representation for taxation, no voice or part in framing the laws, and no participation in fixing the penalties she shall suffer for the violation of law. This is done while it is universally conceded that the right to participate in the formation and enactment of laws is born with and is inseperable from responsibility to law.
Many of the opponents of woman suffrage at the present time assert that men are not born with the right to vote as they are with the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They claim that suffrage is gift of the State, and the State has a right to regulate it in any way that it may deem best for the common good. Now, if suffrage is the gift of the State, can it be explained from whence the State in its origin derived this gift? States, at their birth, or at any other time, are only sections of citizens founded upon a compact which, to accord with the spirit and intent of Republicanism, can confer upon other citizens under this compact nothing which permits the free exercise of self-government not inherent in the authors of such a compact, and nothing inheres in the authors of republican Constitutions and compacts not equally inherent in all the people agreeing to and coming under the jurisdiction of such compacts. If men are born with the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they are also born with the right to give expression as to how, and in what manner, life, liberty and happiness are to be maintained, in this Government, which professes to rest upon the consent of the governed, this expression is given through the ballot, consequently the expression of a freeman's will is as God-given as his right to be free.
The Constitution of this Union declares its people to be citizens, first of the United States, and second of the State wherein they reside consequently it avails nothing to discourse learnedly upon the inequality of the natural, physical and mental conditions of men and women. They are people still and citizens all the same. If all men, even, are created unequal, the inequality consists alone in those things in which there is no uniformity. If Nature does with equal laws tend always to diversity, this diversity has nothing whatever to do with destroying or annuling the equitableness of the laws. Unequal conditions, mentally and physically, affect in no manner equity of the rights and claims of all people. Conditions have always been, still are and always will be unequal and diversified, and at the same time the equality of all people its popular sense remains an unshaken truth. The true reason why all are not now willing to concede to woman the right of expressing her will in Government is just because the majority of the people have thus far failed utterly to grasp the full meaning of the term "liberty," and to acknowledge the overmastering supremacy of justice.
After all, when every argument has been discussed pro and con, and every objection duly considered and set aside, we are compelled to fall back upon the palpable fact that women's claim to the ballot is not conceded just because there is power to withhold it. We approach a vote and law-maker upon this question and ask for an expression concerning the justice of our claims. We are told instantly to turn all our guns upon the women. We are urged to convert the women, and are assured that when we get the 15,000,000 or 20,0000,000 of women citizens to rise up and say that page: 192[View Page 192] they want to vote, the request is sure to be granted. Now it has always been the habit of statemen, statute makers and those supposed to be "wise above all that is written," when considering the propriety of granting new privilege, to talk much about precedent. Can anyone think that we women people have any precedent whatever to look in this matter of voting that would lead us to expect that before we can begin that privilege of expressing the right of suffrage, it is incumbered upon us to prepare all the women of the Nation to desire and demand the ballot? The precedent in the business, in so far as we have any history concerning disfranchised classes in this Government since its foundation, would vey naturally lead us to expect that instead of each and all of us becoming Suffrage Missionaries to twenty millions of women, that the ballot would be handed over to us without so much as asking whether we wanted it or not. The shackles fell from the limbs of several millions of black slaves in this Nation, without their so much as lifting a hand Civil rights dropped upon them unasked and political abilities, in the shape of ful1, untrammeled citizenship, crowned them, undemanded by themselves; and yet our fathers, husbands and brothers tell us whom they admit have the intellegence of the average voter, that there is no principle of justice or right that can exclude us from the exercise of this privilege, but that we must get the women ready to demand it before we can get it. Now, if this question is settled by States it will be left to the voters and not to the women to decide, and if suffrage comes to women through a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, women will not have an opportunity of passing upon the question, consequently if we heed the dictates of login and reason we will devote our best energies and strongest efforts to converting those to whom we must look for the removal of the disabilities which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand women in Ohio and one hundred and eighty thousand in Illinois have expressed a desire to vote, and over one hundred thousand women have notified the United States Congress through petitions that they require of political rights and the force of these appeals upon our Senators and Representatives is exhibited in the tie vote upon our bill in the House Judiciary Committee of the Forty-fifth Congress, and also in the masterly minority report of Senators Hoar, Cameron and Mitchell.
[Mrs. H. proceeded in this manner argumentatively to present facts favorable to this movement, and closed with an appeal to the Members of the House as follows]:
Now, honorable Members of this State Assembly, in our efforts to secure the privileges of citizenship we appeal only to your sense of simple justice and love of fair dealing to take a step before the expiration of this term that will declare to the sisterhood of States that the Legislators of Indiana not only had the grand courage of their convictions, but the clear foresight of men who note the logic of events and understand the general drift of public opinion. You are not asked to grant our demands from any sentimental standpoint. We ask not for sympathy because you have sacred recollections of cherished mothers and peaceful and beautiful homes, but because the privilege of exercising the God-given right of self-government is withheld from an intelligent, law-abiding class of citizens in this Commonwealth; because the mothers and daughters of Indiana are deprived of the symbol and safeguard of self-government; because the free institutions which our fathers founded guarantee no privilege which insures the development of the manhood and freedom of the sons of our State which they do not equally guarantee for the development of the womanhood and freedom of Indiana's daughters.
Mrs. Helen Gougar followed with the following
GENTLEMEN, MEMBERS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF INDIANA--You have courteously permitted my friend and co-laborer, Mrs. Haggart, and myself to occupy some of you valuable time to-day in discussing a certain measure tending to the enlargement of the rights and privileges of the women citizens of Indiana. Be assured, we appreciate gallantry, but we appreciate justice more than gallantry. The time has passed when the women of Indiana will be satisfied with gallantry. To-day we want not only gallantry but justice. We are not here alone by our own convictions, but we are here upon the invitation and appointment of a large and powerful constituency, and not by the appointment of the vicious, unwashed ment and women of this State. We are here by the invitation and appointment of educated, thinking, cultured and patriotic men and women--women engaged in the different professions, trades, arts, sciences and literature, who are demanding increased powers--that the ballot may be given them, that they may use it on behalf of justice and virture.
I have been asked on this occasion to answer what is usually called some of the popular objections against enfranchising women. One gentleman said to me, "Women do not want it." This I deny most emphatically. Any one with the facility of seeing and knowing, as I do, the ladies of this State, will agree with me in saying that nine-tenths of the women with brains above an oyster demand the ballot. [Applause.] There is a class of women who dances all night and sleep all day, who study nothing more elevated than a fashion-plate, or the latest novel, and they are the ones who say "they do not want it." Two hundred thousand women petition for the right of citizenship in Ohio and 180,000 in Illinois. At the same time the gentlemen decided "They do not want it."
Who ever heard of an enslaved class liberating itself? So it will be with the women of Indiana. They can not decide this question for themselves. It is your duty to place the rights of citizenship upon the women of this State, and let them use it or not, as they see fit. Another says "You can not vote because you are not capable of attending to business; you are not financiers." Allow me to say that women are natural financiers, because you know, they have more tact in saying and making a little go a long way because they have but a little money to do a great deal with.
But a few years Susan B. Anthony attempted to speak from the rostrum on the subject of temperance. She was censured and scoffed at. Women were denied the right to speak in public. A Congretational Association of Ministers met and resolved, and issued a public letter warning people against the increasing danger of the female character, because this woman wanted to speak in public. To-day you will find women lifting their voices in behalf of the ballot all over this land.
Our institutions are based upon the idea that all men are created free and equal. In the earlier stanges of our existenceu all rich men were created equal, and property qualification was what decided whether a man should have the right of self-government. The time has come when every man has his say-so in the governmment of the Nation, and I hope that not many years hence the same right will be extended to woman.
Helen M. Gougar, of Lafayette spoke as follows:
Mr. KENNER offered a resolution that the thanks of the House be extended to the able and intelligent speeches made by Mrs. Haggart and Mrs. Gougar to this House.
It was adopted.
The bill [H. R. 252]--woman's suffrage--was read the third time.
Mr. GIBSON movad, ineffectually, that the bill be indefinitely postponed.
Mr. JOHNSON moved to make this bill a special order for next Monday at 10 a. m.
page: 193[View Page 193]The motion was laid on the table.
Mr. ROBINSON moved to make this bill a special order for next Tuesday at 11 a. m.
It was agreed to by yeas, 49; nays, 35.
REPORTS FROM COMMITTEES.
The Judiciary Comittee returned the bill [H. R. 238] relating to the sales of certain lands and lots purchased on behalf of the State, with a favorable report which was concurred in and the bill ordered engrossed.
Mr. LINDSAY, for the Committee on Revision, introduced a bill [H. R. 388] concerning divorces, which was read the first time and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.
The Judiciary Committee reported on the bill [H. R. 10] conerning promissory notes, that it lie on the table.
The report was concurred in.
The Committee on Claims returned the bill [H. R. 247] to enter for taxation all mortgages, recommending its reference to the Committee on Ways and Means.
The report was concurred in.
The Committee on Trust Funds returned the bill [H. R. 222] concerning the sale of land forfeited to the State, reconmending that it pass with amendments.
The report was concurred in, and the bill ordered engrossed.
The Committee on Trust Funds reported on the bill [H. R. 142] concerning sale of certain lands in Jennings County, with recommendation that it lie on the table for the reason that the provisions are embraced in the bill H R. 222.
The report was concurred in.
The Committee on Agriculture returned the bill [H. R. 346] appropriating $20,000 for the representation of Indiana at the World's Fair, recommending its passage.
The report was concurred in, and the bill ordered engrossed for the third reading.
The Committee on County and Township Business returned the bill [H. R. 267] authorizing County Superintendents to collect fines and unclaimed fees from Justices of the Peach, with a report recommending indefinite postponement.
The same Committee reported on the bill [H. R. 279] to amend Section 21 of the Justices act, recommending its passage.
The report was concurred in and the bill ordered engrossed.
The Committee on County and Township Business returned the bill [H. R. 154] to amend Section 4 of the act regulating indebtedness of Counties having a voting population of over 20,000, recommending its passage with amendments.
The report was concurred in and the bill ordered engrossod.
The House adjourned till to-morrow morning.
