TAXPAYING SUFFRAGE 
 
 LETTER FROM CHARLES R. SAUNDERS, ESQ., FOUR YEARS A MEMBER, 
 
 AND THREE YEARS HOUSE CHAIRMAN, OF THE 
 COMMITTEE ON ELECTION LAWS 
 
 To the Counsel of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Exten- 
 sion of Suffrage to Women , on the occasion of a hearing before the Committee 
 on Election Laws of the Massachusetts Legislature , in January , iqoj. 
 
 Boston, January 26, 1903. 
 
 Dear Sir : 
 
 As you are aware, for fundamental and general reasons I 
 consider all bills granting suffrage to women inexpedient in 
 the highest degree. But I am very willing to state the special 
 reasons why I am opposed to House Bill, No. 119, granting 
 municipal suffrage to taxpaying women. 
 
 The bill proposes to reestablish, for women, the tax quali- 
 fication for men, stricken out of the Massachusetts Constitu- 
 tion in 1891 by 90,000 majority. Revolutions do not go 
 backward. It has been settled once for all in Massachusetts 
 that it is the man, and not the house or the horse, that 
 votes. 
 
 But our woman-suffrage friends say, “Taxation without 
 representation is tyranny.” No phrase in political discus- 
 sion is used so frequently with less comprehension of its real 
 meaning. When James Otis used those words before the 
 Revolution, he used them with reference to the action of 
 the British Parliament in imposing taxes upon the colonies 
 without allowing anyone representing them to have a seat in 
 Parliament and state their needs and participate in the law- 
 making power. That is what Otis and Adams and Hancock 
 meant by “taxation without representation,” and such taxa- 
 tion as that was tyranny. 
 
 But nothing was further from these men’s minds than that 
 every individual paying a tax should, in consequence of such 
 
payment, have the right to vote. Why, these were the very 
 men who, a few years later, framed the Constitution of 
 W Massachusetts, in which they declared that the representa- 
 tives of the people ought to be chosen only by those male 
 persons, twenty-one years of age, etc. That shows that our 
 forefathers did not mean by “taxation without representa- 
 tion ” what the suffragists would have us believe they meant, 
 and it is grossly unfair to attempt to mislead people into the 
 belief that that old rallying cry has any application to the 
 woman suffrage question of to-day. 
 
 The fact is that the payment of taxes and the right to vote 
 have no connection whatever. The Boston Terminal Com- 
 pany, paying a tax of $ 218,000 , is the heaviest taxpayer in 
 Boston, but it has no vote. The largest individual taxpayer 
 of Boston, paying a tax of $ 68,000 , could not vote if he 
 could not read and write. A man may own property in 
 half a dozen places in the state, but he can vote in only one, 
 the place of his residence. Minors are fully taxed on their 
 property and so are aliens, but neither class can vote. This 
 theory of the suffragists that taxation and voting go together 
 would lead directly to the establishment of a government 
 based on property, in which each person would be given 
 votes in proportion to the tax he paid. The largest indi- 
 vidual taxpayer mentioned above would have hundreds of 
 times as many votes as I, and I, perhaps, would have sev- 
 eral more than the man who sweeps my office. Such a 
 doctrine militates directly against the rights and liberties of 
 the individual as a member of the body politic. Massachu- 
 setts twelve years ago finally declared that the right to vote 
 rests upon an entirely different foundation from the posses- 
 sion of property and the payment of a tax. 
 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 Charles R. Saunders. 
 
 Issued by the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further 
 Extension of Suffrage to Women. 
 
 Pamphlets and leaflets may be obtained from the Secretary, 
 
 Room 615, 
 
 Kensington Building, 
 
 687 Boylston Street, Boston, Mass.