rom Iowa where things are
very different from those in this beautiful capital. We do not see
Senators and Representatives on every hand but we have lent to
Washington, Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, Secretary of the Treasury
Shaw, Speaker of the House Henderson and also Mrs. Catt to lead the
suffrage clans."

The evening closed with Mrs. Catt's presidential address, the full
report of which filled eleven columns of the _Woman's Journal_. The
subject was the vital necessity of an educational qualification for
the use of the ballot in a country which opens its gates to
immigration from the whole world. Little idea of its logic and
virility can be conveyed by detached quotations. Referring to the
necessity for enfranchising women she said: "Despite the fact that
education even yet is not so generally advocated for girls as for boys
among our foreign and ignorant classes of society, the census of 1900
reveals that between the ages of ten and twenty-one, representing
school years, there are 117,362 more illiterate males than females. If
men and women had been entitled to the franchise upon equal terms in
1900, the political parties, which always make their appeals to the
young man just turned twenty-one to cast his first vote for 'the party
of right and progress,' would of necessity have made the same appeal
to young women, but they would have appealed to 20,000 fewer
illiterates among the women than the men of from twenty-one to
twenty-four. If the same conditions continue for the next twenty
years--that is, if there is no restriction in the suffrage for men and
women still remain disfranchised, and if the proportionate increase of
women over men in the output of our public schools continues, we shall
witness the curious spectacle of the illiterate sex governing the
literate sex."

Mrs. Catt did not, however, attribute all the evils of universal
suffrage to the ignorant vote but said: "It may be that an
investigation would reveal the fact that a very important source of
difficulty is to be found in the failure of intelligent men to
exercise their citizenship. If this proves true it may be found
necessary to turn a leaf backward in our history and adopt the plan in
vogue in some of the New England colonies which made voting
compulsory, and it may be found feasible to demand of every voter who
absents himself on election day an excuse for his absence, and when he
has absented himself without good excuse for a definite nu