ram-shops be
closed or not? Perhaps your husbands are safe--above suspicion or fear
of temptation; but those little sons playing around your knee, that
young brother who is about to leave the paternal roof, when the hour
comes that they shall go forth into the world, is it of any concern to
you whether temptation meet them at every corner? Said a rumseller who
is bitterly opposed to female suffrage, "What more do you want? a man
can not now get license to sell liquor without the names of a majority
of all the women of the ward upon his petition." Very true, but mark
this, unless the women of Kansas obtain the ballot, that law will soon
be blotted from the statute book.

Again: the women of Kansas now vote on questions concerning the
erection of school-houses and matters pertaining to the facilities for
the education of their children. Where has this provision wrought
anything but good? How many school districts now have commodious
school-houses because the women of the district, who were mothers and
wanted schools for their children, outnumbered the men, who, though
large landholders, are not residents or had no children and did not
want schools? Can it be that any woman who has felt and wielded the
power for good that the ballot gave her, in this respect, will yet
declare that she does not want to vote?

If, then, you are capable of forming opinions on matters of public
interest, and if you admit that you are in some degree liable to be
affected by public affairs, in the name of Heaven, of Right, of
Home--in the name of Husband, Brothers, Sons, can you not--will you
not, give your voice in favor of right, and against wrong? Begin now,
if you have never done so before, to inquire into the character of our
law-makers, the justness of our laws, the regard our country pays to
the rights of all. If you do not feel the need of so doing for
yourselves, yet for the sake of generations yet to come, interest
yourselves, "that our officers may be peace and our exactors
righteousness." If you are in circumstances of ease and comfort,
because shielded from every rude wind by noble protectors--father
husband, son--yet listen to the cry of thousands of women less favored
than yourselves, whose natural protectors, as we style them, the
licensed dram-shop transforms into abusive tyrants, from whom they
must be protected, or who, being deprived of husband and father, cry
aloud of the injustice inflicted upon them in their dependent
c