for giving women wage
earners the protection of the ballot. "In the Children's Bureau," Miss
Lathrop said, "we have come to see the close connection between the
welfare of mother and child. Because we are so concerned for the
children we asked a physician to take those vast, mysterious volumes
of the census and look up the facts about the mortality of mothers.
Last year in the United States more than 15,000 women lost their lives
carrying on the life of the race. The death rate from other things,
such as typhoid and diphtheria, has been cut in half but between 1900
and 1913 maternal mortality was not lessened but seemingly increased;
yet this waste of life is just as preventable as those diseases, for
medical science has shown that with proper care the dangers of
childbirth can be made very small. Just as fast as women are allowed a
voice in public affairs it is their duty to see that no mother and
child shall perish for lack of care. Every country should have a
mother and child welfare center. When a memorial was lately proposed
for a woman who had died in the war, a well-known man said: 'We can
enfranchise her sex in tribute to the valor which she proved that it
possessed.' It is not too much to give suffrage to women in tribute to
the 15,000 who are dying every year in this great duty and service;
yet we do not ask the ballot for women as a reward but because, as a
duty and a service, we ought to ask for it...."

"Woman suffrage is needed in the interest of good morals," was the
keynote of Dr. Davis's address, who said:

You cannot legislate righteousness into the human heart but you
can reduce to a minimum the temptations that are offered to
youth. To a large extent you can stop commercialized vice and the
manufacture of criminals. I am not one of those who think that
the millenium will come soon after women get the vote, but I
believe that women will take an unusual interest in the effort to
clean up vicious conditions, because all down the ages women have
paid the price of vice and crime.

I do not believe that at heart a man is any worse than a woman,
but all through the centuries he has been taught that he may do
some things which a woman may not. It is only of late that we
have begun to fight these things in the open and you cannot
successfully fight any evil in the dark. For sixteen years my
work has brought me in contact with this pecul