for enfranchisement. The platform eventually contained the following plank:
In other words, being asked to recognize women as political factors, the committee responded by commending them as nurses!
This plank was written by Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, who as: president of the Woman's National Republican League and a campaign speaker, has done far more for the party than any other woman, and originally it ended with this clause: "We regard with satisfaction their unselfish interest in public affairs in the four States where they have already been enfranchised, and their growing interest in good government and Republican principles." But even so small a recognition as this of women in political life was ruthlessly struck out by the committee.
Mrs. Chapman Catt and Miss Mary G. Hay attended the Democratic National Convention at Kansas City and were not allowed to address any committee, but the platform contained the Declaration of Independence as its preamble!
The Populist national platform adopted at Sioux City did not contain even a reference to women or their rights and privileges.
The Prohibition convention followed its action of 1896 and put no woman suffrage plank in its platform. A separate resolution was passed expressing a favorable regard but carrying no Official weight.
The only national political convention in 1900 which adopted a plank declaring for the enfranchisement of women was that of the Social-Democratic party at Indianapolis.
In not one of the four largest parties were the delegates in convention given so much as an opportunity to discuss and vote on a resolution to enfranchise women. All these heroic efforts, all these noble appeals, had not the slightest effect because made by a class utterly without influence by reason of this very disfranchisement which it was struggling to have removed. At every political convention all matters of right, of justice, of the eternal verities themselves, are swallowed up in the one all-im-
