o women, why should the State incur the risk?"
Whenever I have invited questions, at the close of an address, I have
feared that one. That cheerful air of confidence with which I urged
people to speak right up and ask any question they wished always
covered a trembling and fearful heart. You have heard of people
whistling as they passed a graveyard, and perhaps you thought that
they were frivolously light-hearted? Oh, no! That is not why they
whistled!

When the vote was given to the women in our province and all the
other Western provinces, I confess that I thought our worst troubles
were over. I see now that they were really beginning. A second
Hindenburg line has been set up, and seems harder to pierce than the
first. It is the line of bitter prejudice! Some of those who, at the
time the vote was given, made eloquent speeches of welcome, declaring
their long devotion to the cause of women, are now busily engaged in
trying to make it uncomfortably hot for the women who dare to enter
the political field. They are like the employers who furnish seats for
their clerks in the stores, yet make it clear that to use them may
cost their jobs.

The granting of the franchise to women in western Canada, was brought
about easily. It won, not by political pressure, but on its merits.
There is something about a new country which beats out prejudice, and
the pioneer age is not so far removed as to have passed out of memory.
The real men of the West remember gratefully how the women stood by
them in the old hard days, taking their full share of the hardships
and the sacrifice uncomplainingly. It was largely this spirit which
prompted the action of the legislators of the West. As Kipling says:--

Now and not hereafter, while the breath is in our nostrils,
Now and not hereafter, ere the meaner years go by,
Let us now remember many honorable women--
They who stretched their hands to us, when we were like to die!

There was not any great opposition here in western Canada. One member
did say that, if women ever entered Parliament, he would immediately
resign; but the women were not disturbed. They said that it was just
another proof of the purifying effect that the entrance of women into
politics would have! Sitting in Parliament does not seem like such a
hard job to those of us who have sat in the Ladies' Gallery and looked
over; there is such unanimity among members of Parliament, such
remarkable and unquestioning faith in