the barriers which now
prevent our exercising the right of suffrage....

MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL (N. Y.): We ask for the ballot for the
good of the race. Huxley says: "Admitting, for the sake of
argument, that woman is the weaker, mentally and physically, for
that very reason she should have the ballot and every help which
the world can give her." When you debar from your councils and
legislative halls the purity, the spirituality and the love of
woman, then those councils are apt to become coarse and brutal.
God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better
land, and by our love and our intellect to help make our country
pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must have
stateswomen to bear them....

MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE (N. Y.): It is often said that we have
too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among
us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage.
In the enormous immigration which pours upon our shores every
year, numbering nearly half a million, there come twice as many
men as women. What does this mean? It means a constant
preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means
also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the
foreign men as compared to the native born men. To those who fear
that our American institutions are threatened by this gigantic
inroad of foreigners, I commend the reflection that the best
safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign influence is
to put the ballot in the hands of the American born woman, and of
all other women also, so that if the foreign born man
overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a majority on
the side of the liberty which is secured by our institutions....

MRS. ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARBERT: From the great State of Illinois
I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State who have
recorded their written petitions for woman's ballot, 90,000 of
these being citizens under the law, male voters; those 90,000
have signed petitions for the right of woman to vote on the
temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those petitions;
50,000 men and women signed the petitions for the school vote,
and 60,000 more have signed petitions that the full right of
suffrage might be accorded to