I wish to say further that there is no connection whatever between jury service and the right of suffrage.  The question as to who shall perform jury service, the question as to who shall perform military service, the question as to who shall perform civil official duty in a government is certainly a matter to be regulated by the community itself; but the question of the right to participate in the formation of a government which controls the life and the property and the destinies of its citizens, I contend is a question of right that goes back of these mere regulations for the protection of property and the punishment of offenses under the laws.  It is a matter of right which it is tyranny to refuse to any citizen demanding it.

Now, Mr. President, I shall close by saying:  God speed the day when not only in all the States of the Union and in all the Territories, but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law freed from the last shackle which has been riveted upon her by tyranny and the last disability which has been imposed upon her by ignorance, not only in respect to the right of suffrage, but in every other respect the peer and equal of her brother, man.

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Mr. Vest. Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects popular government based on the will of the people as expressed through their suffrage is not only important but vitally so.  If this Government, which is based on the intelligence of the people, shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature, or corrupt suffrage.  If the ship of state launched by our fathers shall ever be destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of universal, unprepared suffrage.  Suffrage once given can never be taken away.  Legislatures and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that.  When any particular class or portion of the community is once invested with this privilege it is used, accomplished, and eternal.

The Senator who last spoke on this question refers to the successful experiment in regard to woman-suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming and Washington.  Mr. President, it is not upon the plains of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be tested.  Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely settled regions of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else.  The danger of corrupt suffrage is in the cities, and those masses of population to which civilization tends everywhere in all history.  Whilst the country has been pure and patriotic, the cities have been the first cancers to appear upon the body-politic in all ages of the world.