As society improves its condition, the advance made will be ever toward practical equality in all temporal things.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
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These being the birthright of every one, the construction of society should be such as to guarantee it to every one.
Men recognize that this is an imperfect condition of society, made up, as it is of people born free and equal in the eyes of the law, and by it entitled to their chosen path of happiness.
He that has it is independent—is a free man; while he that has it not is dependent—a slave in some one or other of the forms of slavery.
As society is constituted at present, nothing within its interests has so much power for good or ill as money.
All of these subjects are for the laboring classes to take up, examine, decide upon and rectify, and never will they obtain the possibility of an equality until this is done.
A system of taxation for the support of all government—town, city, county, state and national—should be formulated and inaugurated, based upon the proposition that all taxes should be general and none special.
This done, and a sound financial system also inaugurated, the lower classes of society would begin to be leveled up to the medium, and the upper classes to be leveled down to the same basis of material prosperity.
There is no equality to the general people in any of them; and it is quite evident that the whole system of revenue for the support of the government should be remodeled, so as to fall where it should, in justice, upon the taxable property…
It is no wonder you are continuously laborers, never being able to become producers upon your own account, when you, who should not, and, under general principles of taxation would not be called upon to pay a single dollar as a direct tax…
It not only makes it possible for the protected interest to exist at the expense of other interests which consume, but by this operation the government obtains revenue which is an indirect tax gathered from those who are compelled to pay…
Thus formulated, its practices would ever tend to bring all the people into a comprehension of it, which comprehension is now scarcely existent except in meaningless words, which are dealt from pharisaical pulpits.