NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1911
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earner and the capitalist; that of the distribution of the necessities of life; that of the congestion in the cities and depopulation of the country districts. These and many others will take all the wisdom and sympathetic insight of men and women together to solve them. I am glad that men are to have the help of women. They are just entering on their career of greater usefulness in public affairs. With the ballot in their hands they will be endowed with a power much stronger than they have ever had before and they will wield it, I am sure, on the side of right and justice.
Sunday evening the officers of the association were “at home” to delegates, speakers and friends in the parlors of the Hotel Seelbach.
Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, who, to the great happiness of suffragists on several continents, had entirely recovered her health, was now making a trip around the world in the interest of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, of which she was president. At one session a letter from her was read, dated at Kimberly, South Africa, which was enthusiastically received. It said in part:
At the very moment that you will be planning the work for the sixty-third year of the American suffrage campaign, the suffragists of this new-east of all nations will be sitting in their first national convention at Durban, the metropolis of Natal. The movement here is young but is wholly unlike the beginnings of the campaigns in England and America, for our revered pioneers fought their battle against the prejudice ‘and intolerance of their time for the women of the whole world. These women are beginning at the very point where we of the older movements find ourselves today.- The old-time arguments are not heard and here, as everywhere, expediency and political advantage are the causes of opposition.
No two cities could be more unlike than Louisville and Durban. The latter lies in a tropical country with its buildings buried in masses of luxuriant and brilliant flora, all unfamiliar to American eyes. The delegates will look out upon the placid waters of the Indian Ocean and will ride to and fro from their meetings in rickshas drawn by Zulus in the most fantastic dress imaginable, the chief feature being long horns bound upon the head. In Louisville it will be autumn, in Natal it will be spring. Yet, dissimilar as are the scenes of these two conventions, the women composing them will be actuated by the same motives, inspired by the same hopes and working to the same end. The rebellion fomented in that little Seneca Falls convention has overspread the wide earth and from the frigid lands above the North Polar Circle to the most southerly point of the Southern Temperate Zone, the mothers of our race are listening to the new call to duty which these new times are uttering.
