the plantation work
but the wife could not hire one for the work of the house."

Notwithstanding the utmost care and tact on the part of those who had
the convention in charge the "color question" kept cropping out.
Finally Dr. Shaw said: "Here is a query that has been dropped in the
box again and again and now I am asked if I am afraid to answer it:
'Will not woman suffrage make the black woman the political equal of
the white woman and does not political equality mean social equality?'
If it does then the men by keeping both white and black women
disfranchised have already established social equality!" The question
was not asked again.

One of the able addresses during the convention was that of Mrs. Hala
Hammond Butt, president of the Mississippi Suffrage Association,
entitled, Restricted Suffrage from a Southern Point of View. After
referring to the man's all-mastering desire for liberty from the early
history of the race the speaker said: "Did women not share with men
this craving for freedom, then would they justly be reckoned as
unnatural and unworthy members of the human family, but the same red
blood pulses in our veins as in yours, fathers, sons, brothers; we are
alive to the same impulses, our souls are kindled by the same
aspirations as are yours. Why should this, our ambition, be held in
leash by the same bond that holds the ignorant, the illiterate, the
vicious, the irresponsible in the human economy? What does the idea of
government imply? The crystallized sentiments of an intelligent
people? Then do we meet it with but half a truth."

The speaker denounced with much severity the 14th and 15th Amendments
and said that by the restrictive educational qualifications now so
generally adopted in the southern States the spirit of the amendments
had been practically set at naught. "It was born of the instinct of
self-preservation," she said, but she deplored the political crimes it
made possible and continued: "There is an undercurrent of thought that
recognizes in its true proportions the value of an educated suffrage
to the South, a restriction based not upon color, race or previous
condition of servitude, not upon sex, not upon the question of taxable
property, but its sole requirement is the ability to perform worthily
the functions of citizenship. This is the only honorable solution of
those questions that are vexing not only the body political but the
body social of this Southern country."

Mrs. Butt'