on Women and
Prison Reform. In referring to the progress of prison reform he said:
"In this array of apostles and prophets and expositors of the new
penology we find men and women standing side by side." He described
the work in this reform by eminent women in Europe and the United
States and concluded: "In the field of penology woman needs the ballot
as she needs it in other fields, not as an end but as a means, as an
instrument through which she can express her conviction, her
conscience, intelligence, sympathy and love. Questions in philanthropy
are more and more forcing themselves to the front in legislation.
Women are obliged to journey to the Legislature at every session to
instruct members and committees at legislative hearings. Some of these
days the public will think it absurd that women who are capable of
instructing men how to vote should not be allowed to vote themselves.
If police and prison records mean anything they mean that, considered
as law-abiding citizens, women are ten times as good as men. Why debar
the better and enfranchise the worse? In the field of commercial and
political competition, woman may demand the ballot as a right but in
the field of philanthropy and reform she needs it for the fulfillment
of her duties."

Mrs. Nathan, president of the New York Consumers' League, considered
the Wage Earner and the Ballot, her handsome presence, fine humor and
long experience rendering her an unusually attractive speaker. "The
opponents of our cause," she said, "whether they be of the fair sex or
the unfair sex, seem to think that we regard the extension of the
suffrage to women as a panacea for all evils in this world and the
next. No honest suffragist has ever taken that ground. I can not
endorse any such general or sweeping statement but I feel that my
experience in investigating the condition of women wage-earners
warrants the assertion that some of the evils from which they suffer
would not exist if the women had the right to place their votes in the
ballot-box." She compared the industrial and educational situation
where women voted with that of States where they did not and showed
how women were excluded from official positions because disfranchised,
giving conclusive instances of the discrimination in her own State. "I
feel that not only on account of the women wage-earners should women
be accorded the ballot," she said, "but also because they are very
largely the spenders of all family inco