gave a report on the loss of
that State and paid tribute to William Jennings Bryan, who had made
sixteen strong speeches for it. Mrs. Walter McNab Miller, president of
the Missouri association, told of the effort through the hot summer to
get the necessary 38,000 signatures to an initiative petition, after
the Legislature had refused to submit the amendment, and the tactics
used to defeat it at the polls. Her mention of the name of Champ
Clark, Speaker of the National House of Representatives, who had
recently declared for woman suffrage, was applauded. As Mrs. Harriet
Taylor Upton, president of the Ohio Suffrage Association, was not at
the convention, the loss of the amendment in that State was described
by Mrs. Myron Vorce. [See State chapters.]

The evening closed with the president's address. The report said: Dr.
Shaw declared she had some sympathy for the anti-suffragists, as they
were bound to lose. "When the campaign for woman suffrage was begun,"
she said, "the 'antis' had all of the earth and the suffragists had
only hope of heaven but now many nations of the world and half of the
United States have been converted to the cause of votes for women."
She ridiculed the arguments of the anti-suffragists and said: "Until
you grant the right of a vote to all persons, you haven't a
democracy--you have an aristocracy and the worst of all--an
aristocracy of sex. Soon the divine right of sex here will be as
obsolete as the divine right of Kings in Europe." Answering the
argument that if women have the ballot they ought also to have the
musket, Dr. Shaw said in telling of the sufferings of the women during
the war: "It is said that 300,000 of the flower of Europe's manhood
have been killed in the last nine weeks of the war. I can't grasp the
thought of that many dead men but I can look into the face of one dead
soldier and know that he had a mother. If this woman had escaped death
at childbirth she had watched over him day by day until she had to
look up into the eyes of her boy. And then that boy was called by his
country and soon he was dead--he was in the happy peace of glory and
she was facing the empty years of agony. Then they ask what a woman
knows about war!... The very flower of a country perishes in a war,
leaving the maimed and diseased to father the children of future
generations. Women ought to have the ballot during war and during
peace, for we know that if they had had it in all countries this war
would no