t substitutes and to-day hold the highest places in the
Government? But we ask one question: Which every year does most
for the State, the soldier or the mother who risks her life not
to destroy other life but to create it? Of the two it would be
better to disfranchise the soldiers and enfranchise the mothers.
For much as the nation owes to the soldiers, she owes far more to
the mothers who in endless martyrdom make the nation a
possibility....

Man deserves that we should consider his present unhappy
condition. In all ages he has proved his reverence for woman by
embodying every virtue in female form, and has left none for
himself. Truth and chastity, mercy and peace, charity and
justice, all are represented as feminine, and lately, as a proof
of his devotion, he has erected at the entrance to the harbor of
our greatest metropolis a statue of liberty and this too is
represented as a woman.... And so we hail the men, liberty
enlightening a world where woman and man shall alike be free.

One interesting address followed another throughout the convention,
presenting the question of suffrage for women with appeal, humor,
logic, statistics and every variety of argument.

Mrs. Harriette Robinson Shattuck (Mass.) presented in striking
contrast The Women Who Ask and the Women Who Object. Mrs. Elizabeth
Boynton Harbert in a fine address told of Our Motherless Government.
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) gave for the first time her
masterly speech, The Constitutional Rights of the Women of the United
States, which has been so widely circulated in pamphlet form, and
which closed with this peroration:

There are those who say we have too many voters already. No, we
have not too many. On the contrary, to take away the ballot even
from the ignorant and perverse is to invite discontent, social
disturbance, and crime. The restraints and benedictions of this
little white symbol are so silent and so gentle, so atmospheric,
so like the snow-flakes that come down to guard the slumbering
forces of the earth and prepare them for springing into bud,
blossom, and fruit in due season, that few recognize the divine
alchemy, and many impatient souls are saying we are on the wrong
path--the Old World was right--the government of the few is safe;
the wise, the rich, should rule; the ignorant, the poor, shou