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and eloquence were accentuated in the minds of the hearers by the thought that for more than thirty years she had made these pleas before congressional committees, only to be received with stolid indifference or open hostility. She began by saying: "In closing I would like to give a little object lesson of the two methods of gaining the suffrage. By one it is insisted that we shall carry our: question to what is termed a popular vote of each State—that is, that its Legislature shall submit to the electors the proposition to strike the little adjective "male" from the suffrage clause. We have already made that experiment in fifteen different elections in ten different States. Five States have voted on it twice." She then summarized briefly the causes, of the defeats in the various States, and continued:

Now here is all we ask of you, gentlemen, to save us women from any more tramps over the States, such as we have made now fifteen times. In nine of those campaigns I myself, made a canvass from county to county. In my own State of New York at the time of the constitutional convention in 1894, I visited every county of the sixty—I was not then 80 years of age, but 74.....

There is an enemy of the homes of this nation and that enemy is drunkenness. Every one connected with the gambling house, the brothel and the saloon works and votes solidly against the enfranchisement of women, and, I say, if you believe in chastity, if you believe in honesty and integrity, then do what the enemy wants you not to do, which is to take the necessary steps to put the ballot in the hands of women.....

I pray you to think of this question as you would if the one-half of the people who are disfranchised were men, if we women had absolute power to control every condition in this country and you were obliged to obey the laws and submit to whatever arrangements we made. I want you to report on this question exactly as if the masculine half of the people were the ones who were deprived of this right to a vote in governmental affairs. You would not be long in bringing in a favorable report if you were the ones who were disfranchised and denied a voice in your Government. If it were not women—if it were the farmers of this country, the manufacturers, or any class of men who were robbed of their inalienable rights, then we would see that class rising in rebellion, and the Government shaken to its very foundation; but being women, being only the mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of men who constitute the aristocracy, we have to submit.

The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw (Penn.) presided over the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.^[1] The Constitu-

1. George W. Ray, N. Y., chairman: John J. Jenkins, Wis.; Richard Wayne Parker,