ters and of many
sorrows have sifted. Here "we who are about to die salute you."
We do not come asking for gifts of profit or preferment for
ourselves; for us the day for ban or benison has almost passed.
But we ask for greater freedom, for better conditions for the
children of our love, whom we shall so soon leave behind. In the
short space allowed each petitioner we have not time to ask for
much. But in my State the grandmothers of seventy are growing
weary of being classed with the grandsons of seven. They fail to
find a valid reason why they should be relegated to perpetual
legal and political childhood.

Years ago, when the bugle call rang out over this unhappy land,
as the men rallied to the standard of their State, we, the wives
and mothers, who had no voice in bringing about those cruel
conditions, were called to give up our brightest and best for
cannons' food. We furnished the provisions, ministered on the
battlefield, nursed in the hospital; we, equally with our
brothers, regarded "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor"
only as gifts held in trust to spend and be spent for home and
State. And to-day when we see the wayfaring man, who probably
hails from a penal institution of the Old World, who honors no
home, no country and no political faith, freely enjoying the
right to say who shall make and who shall enforce the laws by
which we women are governed, we grow weary of being classed as
perpetual aliens upon our nation's soil.

The honest, industrious, bread-winning women of Tennessee do not
enjoy the knowledge that the pauper of their State is their
political superior. Four years ago we saw it practically
demonstrated that when a great moral issue was at stake the male
pauper could cast his ballot without hindrance from the penal
code, but if the widow or the single woman, who earned and owned
property and paid her quota of the tax for his support, should
attempt to cast a counteracting ballot, her penalty would be fine
or imprisonment.

Year after year we have journeyed to the Mecca of the
petitioner--the legislative halls. There we have asked protection
for our boys from the temptation of the open saloon; we have
asked that around our baby girls the wall of protection might be
raised at least a little higher