right to be their own law-makers? The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master. Thus, and thus only, does he gain the authority.
It is all very well to say, "Convert the women." While we most heartily wish they could all feel as we do, yet when it comes to the decision of this great question they are mere ciphers, for if it is settled by the States it will be left to the men, not to the women, to decide. Or if suffrage comes to women through a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, it will be decided by Legislatures elected by men only. In neither case will women have an opportunity of passing upon the question. So reason tells us we must devote our best efforts to converting those to whom we must look for the removal of the barriers which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage. ....
Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.): We ask for the ballot for the good of the race. Huxley says: "Admitting, for the sake of argument, that woman is the weaker, mentally and physically, for that very reason she should have the ballot and every help which the world can give her." When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the purity, the spirituality and the love of woman, then those councils are apt to becbme coarse and brutal. God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help make our country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must have stateswomen to bear them. ....
Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.): It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage. In the enormous immigration which pours upon our shores every year, numbering nearly half a million, there come twice as many men as women. What does this mean? It means a constant preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the foreign men as compared to the native born men. To those who fear that our American institutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners, I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American born woman, and of all other women also, so that if the foreign born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a majority on the side of the liberty which is secured by our institutions. ....
Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert: From the great State of Illinois I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State who have recorded their written petitions for woman's ballot, 90,000 of these being citizens under the law, male voters; those 90,000 have signed petitions for the right of woman to vote on the temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those petitions; 50,000 men and women signed the petitions for the school vote, and 60,000 more have signed petitions that the full right of suffrage might be accorded to woman.
