d not to enter into any discussion of the race question. But now I
am told by the writer of this note that we dare not answer it. I wish
to say that we dare to answer it if you dare to have it answered--and I
leave it to you to decide whether I shall answer it or not."

I read the question aloud. Then the audience called for the answer, and
I gave it in these words, quoted as accurately as I can remember them:

"If political equality is the basis of social equality, and if by
granting political equality you lay the foundation for a claim of social
equality, I can only answer that you have already laid that claim. You
did not wait for woman suffrage, but disfranchised both your black and
your white women, thus making them politically equal. But you have done
more than that. You have put the ballot into the hands of your black
men, thus making them the political superiors of your white women.
Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the
political masters of their former mistresses!"

The point went home and it went deep. I drove it in a little further.

"The women of the South are not alone," I said, "in their humiliation.
All the women of America share it with them. There is no other nation in
the world in which women hold the position of political degradation our
American women hold to-day. German women are governed by German men;
French women are governed by French men. But in these United States
American women are governed by every race of men under the light of the
sun. There is not a color from white to black, from red to yellow, there
is not a nation from pole to pole, that does not send its contingent to
govern American women. If American men are willing to leave their women
in a position as degrading as this they need not be surprised when
American women resolve to lift themselves out of it."

For a full moment after I had finished there was absolute silence in
the audience. We did not know what would happen. Then, suddenly, as the
truth of the statement struck them, the men began to applaud--and the
danger of that situation was over.

Another episode had its part in driving the suffrage lesson home to
Southern women. The Legislature had passed a bill permitting tax-paying
women to vote at any election where special taxes were to be imposed for
improvements, and the first election following the passage of this bill
was one in New Orleans, in which the question of better drainage fo