sufficient size and standing in the country to warrant asking the President to do this one thing. He could have declined the invitation and no one would have been offended. He could have said he was an anti-suffragist. He could have tactfully omitted his opinion and confined his time to greetings and welcome as Chief Executive to the convention as a large organization of the women of the nation. At the point where the supposed hissing occurred, it was as if the speaker had struck those women in the face with a whip. Even those who most resented the President's remarks regretted the expression of open disapproval in such a manner, but, to a person, the audience felt that he had been untactful, and, however unintentionally, had implied an odious comparison; that he had not sufficiently considered this great body of the picked women of the land to choose his language in addressing them."
The President's address was preceded by one given by Professor Potter on The Making of Democracy, which had seldom been equalled in its statesmanlike qualities. This was followed by a powerful argument on Why Women Should Have the Suffrage, by Senator Robert L. Owen (Okla.), one of the ablest speakers in the U. S. Senate and always an uncompromising supporter of the political rights of women.
At an afternoon session Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery (Penn.), who had succeeded Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt as chairman of the Committee on Petition to Congress, took up the report where it had ended at the last convention. She said that, in addition to the 100,000 petitions and 5,000 individual letters sent from New York under Mrs. Catt's supervision, there had gone out from the headquarters after they had been removed to Washington and placed in charge of Mrs. Rachel Brill Ezekiel, 60,000 more petitions, 11,000 more letters and 1,185 postals with appeals. 'The petition," she said, "has been a means of introducing suffrage into thousands of households and hundreds of meetings of all kinds in which the subject had not before been mentioned. Even women's clubs have had to listen to suffrage when brought to them by eager seekers after signatures. It has given to many people who have never before done anything for suffrage an opportunity. In some cases whole neighborhoods
