f electing U. S. Senators;
how the plank in the national platform adopted in Baltimore exempting
American ships in coastwise trade from Panama canal tolls was now
before the Democrats in Congress for repudiation; how another plank
demanded State action on presidential primaries and President Wilson
called for a national law. Now a Democratic Congress refused to submit
a national suffrage amendment because the platform did not ask for it!
She concluded: "No, gentlemen, you can not answer us by shaking in our
faces that tatterdemalion of a State's rights scarecrow.... It is a
travesty upon our reasoning faculties to suppose that we can not put
two and two together. It is underestimating our strength and our
financial resources to suppose that we can not place these plain facts
in the hands of 15,000,000 voters, including over 3,000,000 women. To
take away from the States the right to determine how Presidential
electors shall be chosen is upholding the Constitution and the
previous rights of the States; but to submit to the States an
amendment permitting them to decide for themselves whether they want
woman suffrage for the nation is a violent usurpation of State's
rights! We can not follow your logic."

Dr. Cora Smith King of Seattle, who had so large a part in obtaining
equal suffrage in Washington, said:

I am a voter like yourselves; I am eligible to become a member of
Congress, like any one of you. However, I do not stand before you
as one voter only but to remind you that there are nearly
4,000,000 women voters in the United States today. I represent
an organization called the National Council of Women Voters,
organized in every one of the States where women vote on equal
terms with men. These States, as you know, are Wyoming, Colorado,
Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona.
There are three objects of the Council: One is to educate
ourselves in the exercise of our citizenship; the second is to
aid in our own States where we vote in putting upon the statute
books laws beneficial to men and women, children and the home;
and our third object is the one which brings me here this
morning--to aid in the further extension of suffrage to women.

The members of your committee from the latest equal suffrage
States will bear me out in saying that there are thousands of
women voters who have not yet made their party