Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/340

learn to blame a man as much if he betrays a public trust as we do if he deserts his wife.

Have we done our full duty when we have loved and served and taken care of those that every beast on earth loves and serves and takes care of—our own young? That is the beginning of human duty but not the whole of it. The duty of woman is not confined to the reproduction of the species; it extends to the working of the will of God on earth. The family is a leaf on the tree of the State. It can grow in strength and purity while the State is healthy, but when the State is degraded the family becomes degraded with it. We have not done our full duty to the family till we have done our best to serve the State.

Miss Shaw took up this subject, saying:

The millennium will not come as soon as women vote, but it will not come until they do vote. Ifa woman has only a little brain, she has a right to the fullest development of all she has. .... If we are to keep our children healthy, as Mrs. Stetson says is our duty, pure water is essential. I know a city (Philadelphia) where you can fast for forty days, drinking only water, and grow fat— because you have chowder every time. Is there any reason why women should not have a vote in regard to water-works? A woman knows as much about water as a man. Generally, she drinks more of it. See how the street cleaners sweep the dirt into heaps on Monday and leave it to blow about until Saturday, before it is taken up. Any housekeeper would know better. Sewers and man-traps spread disease literally and also metaphorically. You may teach your boy every precept in the Bible from beginning to end, and he will go out into the street and be taught to violate every one of them, under the protection of law, and you can't help yourself or him.

At one of the morning meetings Miss Anthony said in response to a message from the W. C. T. U. accompanied by a great bunch of daisies: "We always are glad to receive greetings from this society, because one of its forty departments is for the franchise. The suffrage association has only one, but that one aims to make every State a true republic." She continued: 'A newspaper of this city has criticized the suffrage banner with its four stars and has accused us of desecrating our country's flag. But no one ever heard anything about desecration of the flag during the political campaign, when the names and portraits of all the candidates were tacked to it. Our critics compare us to Texas and its lone star. We have not gone out of the Union, but four States have come in. Keep your flag flying, and do not let any one persuade you that you are desecrating it by putting on stars for the