pletely as men do Municipal
suffrage would mean a higher rating industrially, a fairer
compensation for their labor and more possible living conditions.

Mrs. Kelley, who, as executive secretary of the National Consumers'
League for years and before that as State Factory Inspector of
Illinois, had an unsurpassed knowledge of the conditions that affect
women and children, gave a scathing review of the failure of Congress
to enact protective laws and of the reactionary decisions of Supreme
Courts. "Do we ask what this has to do with Municipal suffrage?" she
inquired and answered:

If we are not to be given power to help determine our own laws by
electing men to Congress in the larger field of the republic; and
if, one by one, the States are to repeal or annul the legislation
that once gave some slender protection to women and youth, there
remains at least the city. It should be our immediate demand that
in all matters of the life of a city we shall have a word. The
greatest numbers of working people are in the cities. If our
boards of health, our school boards, our street-cleaning
departments, our water boards--if all these local bodies which
have most to do with the health of working people, as with the
health of other people, in the great centers of population--can
be given the additional stimulus which comes from the lively
interest of women, (both those who support themselves and those
who have more leisure), then a very large proportion of the
working women can have more adequate care for life and health and
the children will have education beyond that which we have as yet
achieved.

Does any one here believe that if the women had power to make
themselves felt in the administration of school affairs we should
have 80,000 children on half-time in New York City? Truly, if the
mothers of these school children, as well as their fathers, spoke
in the elections, the interest in the schools would be quite a
different one. Does any one believe that if the women of this
community could make themselves felt more effectively than by
"persuasion," if they could make their will felt, we should have
such a smoky sky as characterizes Chicago? Does any one believe
that we should have to boil all the water before we dared to
drink it? It would make a vast difference if women in Ameri