in demonstrating that The Liberty of the Mother means the Liberty of the Race, showed the need of truer companionship between man and woman and that the political disabilities of women affect all humanity. This was further illustrated by Mrs. Annie L. Diggs (Kas.) under the topic Women as Legislators. She said in part:
You have before you a great problem as to whether republican government itself is to be successful at this time, and statesmen to save their souls can not tell what will be the outcome. We believe that women have in their possession what is needed to make it a success—those things upon which are built the home life and the ethical life of the nation. We can supply what is lacking, not because women are better than men, but because they are other than men; because they have a supplementary part, and it is their mission to guard most sacredly and closely those things which protect the home life. Because of their womanhood, because of their divine function of motherhood, women must always be most closely concerned with the matters that pertain to the home. It belongs to man, with his strong right arm, to pioneer the way, and then woman comes along to help him build the enduring foundation upon which everything rests.
Miss Shaw, in a short, good-naturedly sarcastic speech on The Bulwarks of the Constitution, showed the illogical position of President Eliot of Harvard in declaiming grand sentiments in favor of universal suffrage and then protesting against having them applied to women. The last number on the program was The Ballot as an Improver of Motherhood, by Mrs. Stetson. It was an address of wonderful power which thrilled the audience. Among other original statements were these:
We have heard much of the superior moral sense of woman. It is superior in spots but not as a whole. .... Here is an imaginary case which will show how undeveloped in some respects woman’s moral sense still is: Suppose a train was coming with a children’s picnic on board—three hundred merry, laughing children. Suppose you saw this train was about to go through an open switch and over an embankment, and your own child was playing on the track in front of it. You could turn the switch and save the train, or save your own child by pulling it off the track, but there was not time to do both. Which would you do? I have put that question to hundreds of women. I never have found one but said she would save her own child, and not one in a hundred but claimed this would be absolutely right. The maternal instinct is stronger in the hearts of most women than any moral sense. ....
What is the suffrage going to do for motherhood? Women enter
