serfdom. In Jamaica 75 per cent. of the births are illegitimate for this reason. When I visited Haiti, I was told to my great surprise that the homes and small farms were usually owned by the women. Expressing my admiration of this chivalrous recognition of women's right to the homestead, I was informed that there was no such sentiment. It was solely because the men were so lazy and unreliable that the perpetuity of the race was endangered. The fathers of the children were here to-day and away to-morrow. They spent their time in loafing, drinking, gambling and plotting "revolutions." The women, anchored by the love for their children, lived in the little huts on their small plantations, raising yams and bananas, and if the men became too drunken and abusive the women ordered them to leave. Among those people, in a tropical climate, with land to squat upon, most of the work is done by the women. Let no one imagine that the so-called "matriarchate" of early ages was an ideal condition of society. It was based primarily upon the industrial and moral irresponsibility of men.
In our new possessions, side by side with these primitive conditions, we have great bodies of Chinese and Hindoo coolies, who represent ancient and fossilized types of civilized society, patient, economical, industrious, monogamous and exclusive in their family relations. The trouble is that where Western civilization interferes with Oriental abuses it does not go far enough. When in India the British government prohibited the custom of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands, widows became the slaves of their husband's relatives, and were actually believed to be responsible for his death and were ill treated accordingly. When infanticide was forbidden and peace maintained, population multiplied until famine became chronic. The only salvation for the women of our new possessions lies in a legal recognition of their personal, industrial, social and political equality. If, as seems too probable, their rights shall be simply ignored in the reconstruction, women will suffer all the disabilities of the law, without the practical alleviations afforded by an enlightened public opinion. Such women, even more than those of our own States, will need the ballot as a means of self-protection. ....
Miss Anthony: I have been overflowing with wrath ever since the proposal was made to engraft our half-barbaric form of government on Hawaii and our other new possessions. I have been studying how to save, not them, but ourselves from the disgrace. This is "the first time the United States has ever tried to foist upon a new people the exclusively masculine form of government. Our business should be to give this people the highest form which has been attained by us. When our State governments were originally formed, there was no example of woman suffrage anywhere, but now we have a great deal of it, and everywhere it has done good. The principle is constantly spreading. ....
We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of j justice—that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men—because we shall not get it.
