a welcome in the name of
its membership of 294 clubs and told of the increasing growth of
suffrage sentiment among them. "Through the work of our Industrial,
Civil Service and Legislative Committees," she said, "we have learned
our need of the ballot." The Rev. Charles R. Henderson, Professor of
Sociology, an earnest suffragist, welcomed the convention, saying in
part:

As I am to represent the University of Chicago, it will not do
for me to make a speech on either side. No one person can
represent the sentiments of four hundred men, who all the time
are in an attitude of friendly hostility to anything that comes
up. I think, however, there is one point of sympathy with us who
are engaged in the work of investigation, trying to get beyond
the frontier of present knowledge of all the sciences. It is
this: As soon as anything comes to be in the possession of the
majority, it loses interest for us; as long as there is something
to do, we are interested in it. When the effort for woman
suffrage is a thing of the past, then the people will take care
of it. Our duty is to make the public sentiment and let some one
else put it into legal form....

They say that women cannot manage the great questions of
government. That has yet to be submitted to the final scientific
test of experiment. As a matter of fact, today the one highest,
finest, noblest task of society, if not of government, is the
task of education and the inculcation of religion and of ideals;
and in this land, which in most respects leads all lands, woman
has the first word in this matter, as hers is the strongest and
the wisest word, and her influence, her thought and her character
lead upward and on. I need not, in this presence, argue the
question.

I do not speak merely for the University of Chicago. I am proud
to belong to a university of letters, a republic that has its
branches in all parts of the civilized world. And I am glad that,
from the time I started to learn to read, in my own education in
this Middle West, from my childhood with my mother, through the
church, the Sunday school, the elementary and secondary schools,
the college and now the university, I have seen women side by
side with men, sharing the same teaching and having the same
teachers. That is what we stand for in the Middle We