the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove from the polls the ward workers who had been so obnoxious in the past.
Through the courtesy of the Governor and the approval of the Senate they have been given places upon various State boards, and in the last Legislature, in both the Senate and the House, they represented the two most populous and wealthy counties of Utah. The bills introduced by women received due consideration, and a majority were enacted into laws. Whatever they have been required to do they have done to the full satisfaction of their constituents, and they have proved most careful and painstaking public officers.
No one in Utah will dispute the statements I have made. To the people of that young commonwealth, destined by its manifold resources and the intelligence of its men and women to become the Empire State of the Rocky Mountains, I refer you, in the fullest confidence that, with scarcely a dissenting voice, they will say that woman suffrage is no longer an experiment, but is a practical reality, tending to the well-being of the State.
Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, national recording secretary, took for a subject The Indifference of Women:
It is often said that the chief obstacle to equal suffrage is the indifference and opposition of women, and that whenever the ma— jority ask for the ballot they will get it. But it is a simple historical fact that every improvement thus far made in their condition has been secured, not by a general demand from the majority, but by the arguments, entreaties and "continual coming" of a persistent few. In each case the advocates of progress have had to contend not merely with the conservatism of men, but with the indifference of women, and often with active opposition from some of them.
When a man in Saco, Me., first employed a saleswoman the men boycotted his store, and the women remonstrated with him on the sin of which he was guilty in placing a young woman in a position of such publicity. When Lucy Stone tried to secure for married women the right to their own property, they asked with scorn, "Do you think I would give myself where I would not give my property?" When Elizabeth Blackwell began to study medicine, the women at her boarding house refused to speak to her, and those passing her on the streets would hold their skirts aside so as not to touch her. It is a matter of history with what ridicule and opposition Mary Lyon's first efforts for the education of women were received, not only by the mass of men, but by the mass of women as well. In England when the Oxford examinations were thrown open to women, the Dean of Chichester preached a sermon against it, in which he said: "By the sex at large, certainly, the new cur-
