fact that all legal papers are made out with this pronoun, which presents no difficulty in their application to women.
Henry B. Payne of Ohio said that he was not in favor of woman suffrage, and that no woman in England ever had been permitted to exercise the elective franchise. (Women then had been voting in England for twenty-one years, the same length of time as in Wyoming.) He asked, however, if these little technical objections would not be more than overcome by the moral influence that a woman Representative might exert in the committee rooms and on the floor of the House.
Mr. Morgan at once launched forth into a panegyric on the moral influence of woman which certainly demonstrated that if sentimentalism were a bar to voting, as Senators Vest and Reagan had insisted it should be, the senator from Alabama would have to be disfranchised. Part of it ran as follows:
James K. Jones of Arkansas based his argument on the estimate of an equal number of men and women in Wyoming, and assumed that all the women had voted in favor of the suffrage clause and that therefore it did not represent the wishes of men, thus denying wholly the right of women to a voice in a matter which so vitally concerned themselves. In reality women formed considerably less than one-third of the adult population, while the constitution was adopted by more than a three-fourths vote.
- ↑ In 1901, when a convention in Alabama was framing a new constitution, Senator Morgan sent a strong letter urging that this should include suffrage for tax-paying women.