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port it "inexpedient" to secure equal rights to the women of the United States. But we are not discouraged; we are not disheartened; all the Wadleighs in the Senate, all the committees of both Houses, the whole congress of the United States against us, would not lessen our faith, nor our efforts. We know we are right; we know we shall be successful; we know the day is not far distant, when this government and the world will acknowledge the exact and permanent political equality of man and woman, and we know that until that hour comes woman will be oppressed, degraded; a slave, without a single right that man feels himself bound to respect. Work then, women, for your own freedom. Let the early morning see you busy, and dusky evening find you planning how you may become free.

But the most severe judgment upon Mr. Wadleigh's action came from his own constituents, who, at the close of the forty-fifth congress excused his further presence in the United States Senate, sending in his stead the Hon. Henry W. Blair, a valiant champion of national protection for national citizens.^[1]

In April, 1878, Mrs. Williams transferred the Ballot-Box to Mrs. Gage, who removed it to Syracuse, New York, and changed its name to the National Citizen. In her prospectus Mrs. Gage said:

The National Citizen will advocate the principle that suffrage is the citizen's right, and should be protected by national law, and that, while States may regulate the suffrage, they should have no power to abolish it. Its especial object will be to secure national protection to women in the exercise of their right to vote; it will oppose class legislation of whatever form. It will support no political party until one arises which is based upon the exact equality of man and woman.

As the first step towards becoming well is to know you are ill, one of the principal aims of the National Citizen will be to make those women discontented who are now content; to waken them to self-respect and a desire to use the talents they possess; to educate their consciences aright; to quicken their sense of duty; to destroy morbid beliefs, and fit them for their high responsibilities as citizens of a republic. The National Citizen has no faith in that old theory that "a woman once lost is lost forever," neither does it believe in the assertion that "a woman who sins, sinks to depths of wickedness lower than man can reach." On the contrary it believes there is a future for the most abandoned, if only the kindly hand of love and sympathy be extended to rescue them from the degradation into which they have fallen. The National Citizen will endeavor to keep its readers informed of the progress of women in foreign countries, and will, as far as possible, revolutionize this country, striving to make it live up to its own fundamental principles and become in reality what it is but in name—a genuine republic.

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1. Senator Blair has just been elected (June, 1885) to a second term, thus insuring his services to our cause in the Senate for another six years.