that has been trodden, but when you think of the cumulating force
of the movement in recent decades you must agree with me that it
is one of the most astonishing tides in modern history. Two
generations ago--no doubt Madam President will agree with me in
saying this--it was a handful of women who were fighting for
this cause; now it is a great multitude of women who are fighting
for it. There are some interesting historical connections which I
should like to attempt to point out to you.

One of the most striking facts about the history of the United
States is that at the outset it was a lawyers' history. Almost
all of the questions to which America addressed itself, say a
hundred years ago, were legal questions; were questions of
methods, not questions of what you were going to do with your
government but questions of how you were going to constitute your
government; how you were going to balance the powers of the State
and the Federal government; how you were going to balance the
claims of property against the processes of liberty; how you were
going to make up your government so as to balance the parts
against each other, so that the Legislature would check the
Executive and the Executive the Legislature. The idea of
government when the United States became a nation was a
mechanical conception and the mechanical conception which
underlay it was the Newtonian theory of the universe. If you take
up the Federalist you see that some parts of it read like a
treatise on government. They speak of the centrifugal and
centripetal forces and locate the President somewhere in a
rotating system. The whole thing is a calculation of power and
adjustment of parts. There was a time when nobody but a lawyer
could know enough to run the government of the United States....

And then something happened. A great question arose in this
country which, though complicated with legal elements, was at
bottom a human question and nothing but a question of humanity.
That was the slavery question, and is it not significant that it
was then, and then for the first time, that women became
prominent in politics in America? Not many women--those prominent
in that day are so few that you can almost name them over in a
brief catalogue--but, nevertheless, they then began to pl