help him build the
enduring foundation upon which everything rests.

Miss Shaw, in a short, good-naturedly sarcastic speech on The Bulwarks
of the Constitution, showed the illogical position of President Eliot
of Harvard in declaiming grand sentiments in favor of universal
suffrage and then protesting against having them applied to women. The
last number on the program was The Ballot as an Improver of
Motherhood, by Mrs. Stetson. It was an address of wonderful power
which thrilled the audience. Among other original statements were
these:

We have heard much of the superior moral sense of woman. It is
superior in spots but not as a whole.... Here is an imaginary
case which will show how undeveloped in some respects woman's
moral sense still is: Suppose a train was coming with a
children's picnic on board--three hundred merry, laughing
children. Suppose you saw this train was about to go through an
open switch and over an embankment, and your own child was
playing on the track in front of it. You could turn the switch
and save the train, or save your own child by pulling it off the
track, but there was not time to do both. Which would you do? I
have put that question to hundreds of women. I never have found
one but said she would save her own child, and not one in a
hundred but claimed this would be absolutely right. The maternal
instinct is stronger in the hearts of most women than any moral
sense....

What is the suffrage going to do for motherhood? Women enter
upon this greatest function of life without any preparation, and
their mothers permit them to do it because they do not recognize
motherhood as a business. We do not let a man practice as a
doctor or a druggist, or do anything else which involves issues
of life and death, without training and certificates; but the
life and death of the whole human race are placed in the hands of
utterly untrained young girls. The suffrage draws the woman out
of her purely personal relations and puts her in relations with
her kind, and it broadens her intelligence. I am not disparaging
the noble devotion of our present mothers--I know how they
struggle and toil--but when that tremendous force of mother love
is made intelligent, fifty per cent of our children will not die
before they are five years old, and those that grow up wil