Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/260

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
200
HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

any movement for the uplifting of society you will find women in the forefront. There never has been any great movement in this nation when women have not stood side by side with the noblest and truest men.

We do to-day nine-tenths of the philanthropic work, nine-tenths of the church work, and form three-fourths of the church membership. We are the teachers of the young; we are the mothers of the race. If you want the noblest men you must have the noblest mothers. "Eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive" the kind of men and women God had in view when He created man in His own likeness and gave to male and female dominion over the world, to subdue it and to bring out of it the best things.

You who talk of a great Government in which the voice of God is heard must remember that, if "the voice of the people is the voice of God," you never will know what that is until you get the voice of the people, and you will find it has a soprano as well as a bass. You must join the soprano voice of God to the bass voice in order to get the harmony of the Divine voice. Then you will have a law which will enable you to say, "We are a people justly ruled, because in this nation the voice of the people is the voice of God, and the voice of the people has been heard."

Mrs. Ellen M. Bolles (R. I.) said in the course of her remarks: "The conditions surrounding women to-day are quite different from what they were in the days of our grandmothers. Women are becoming property earners and owners, as they were not in those former times before they began asking for the ballot. Twenty-five per cent. or more of the women of this country are property owners. Nearly nine-tenths of the laws are made for the protection of property and of those who own it and who earn wages. Now it seems to me that this twenty-five per cent. of the women 'should have a voice in the making of laws for the protection of their property and of their right to earn a living. son

Mrs. Colby thus closed her address on Wyoming: "Having thus shown that the twenty-two years' experience of woman suffrage has been satisfactory to the citizens of Wyoming; that it has conduced to good order in the elections and to the purity of politics; that the educational system is improved and that teachers are paid without regard to sex; that Wyoming stands alone in a decreased proportion of crime and divorce; and that it has elevated the personal character of both sexes—what possible good is there left to speak of as coming to that State from woman suffrage save its position as the vanguard of progress and human