, after the eloquent rhetoric to which you have listened
I merely come in these five minutes with a plain statement of
facts. Some friends have said, "Here is the same company of women
that year after year besiege you with their petitions." We are
here to-day in a representative capacity. 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 having signed petitions for the right of women 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 nearly 60,000 more have signed petitions that the right of
suffrage might be accorded to woman.

This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs
of the children and the working-women of that great State. I
come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and
legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the
people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often
turned to the material and political interests of the nation. I
claim that the mother thought, the woman element needed, is
to supplement the concurrent statesmanship of American men on
political and industrial affairs with the domestic legislation of
the nation.

There are good men and women who believe that women should use
their influence merely through their social sphere. I believe both
of the great parties are represented by us. You remember that a
few weeks ago when there came across the country the news of
the decision of the Supreme Court as regards the negro race the
politicians sprang to the platform, and our editors hastened
to their sanctums, to proclaim to the people that that did not
interfere with the civil rights of the negro; that only their
social rights were affected, and that the civil rights of man,
those rights worth dying for, were not affected. Gentlemen, we who
are trying to help the men in our municipal governments, who are
trying to save the children from our poor-houses, begin to realize
that whatever is good and essential for the liberty of the black
man is good for the white woman and for all women. We are here to
claim that whatever liberty has done