our fathers, and probably as much influenced by that rearing as
they were. We shall go to strengthen both the parties, neither
the one nor the other the more, probably. So this is not a
partisan measure; it is a just measure, which is our due, because
of what we are, men and women both, by virtue of our heritage and
our one Father, our one Mother eternal.

MRS. HELEN M. GOUGAR (Ind.): I maintain there is no political
question paramount to that of woman suffrage before the people of
America to-day. Political parties would have us believe that
tariff is the great question of the hour. It is an insult to the
intelligence of the present to say that when one-half of the
citizens of this republic are denied a direct voice in making the
laws under which they shall live, that the tariff, the civil
rights of the negro, or any other question which can be brought
up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom to women.

I ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall
live because the older empires of the earth are sending to the
United States a population drawn very largely from their asylums,
penitentiaries, jails and poor-houses. They are emptying those
men upon our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted
with the ballot, the law-making power in this republic, and they
and their representatives are seated in official and legislative
positions. I, as an American-born woman, enter my protest at
being compelled to live under laws made by this class of men
while I am denied the protection that can only come from the
ballot. While I would not have you take this right from those men
whom we invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this
immense foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying,
intelligent, moral, native-born women of America.

....We have in our State the signatures of over 5,000 of the
school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the
Government does not need the voice of those 5,000 educated
teachers as much as it needs the voice of the 240 criminals who
are, on an average, sent out of the penitentiary of Indiana each
year, to go to the ballot-box upon every question, and make laws
under which those teachers must live, and under which the mothers
of our State must keep their homes and