shall have time to take up the cause of equal suffrage."
Is not this a survival of that old vice of womankind,
indirection?... The suffrage issue should not be put off but
should be placed first, as making the other issues easier and
more permanent....

This brings me to the other platitude. How often we are told,
"Women themselves do not want it; when they do it will be given
to them." That is to say, when an overwhelming majority of women
want what they ought to have, then they can have it. Extension of
suffrage never has been granted on these terms. No great reform
has gone through on these terms. In an enlightened State wanting
is not considered a necessary condition to the granting of
education or the extension of any privilege. Such a State confers
it in order to create the desire; unenlightened States, like
Turkey and Russia, hold off until revolution compels a reluctant,
niggardly abdication of tyranny.... We have the conviction that
that which has come in Finland and Australia, which is coming in
Great Britain, will come in America, and there is a majesty in
the sight of a great world-tide which has been gathering force
through generations, which is rising steadily and irresistibly,
that should paralyze any American Xerxes who thinks to stop it
with humanly created restraints.

Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, received an
ovation. "The formation of this National College League," she said,
"indicates that college women will be ready to bear their part in the
stupendous social change of which the demand for woman suffrage is
only the outward symbol," and she continued:

Sixty years ago all university studies and all the charmed world
of scholarship were a man's world, in which women had no share.
Now, although only one woman in one thousand goes to college even
in the United States, where there are more college women than in
any other country, the position of every individual woman in
every part of the civilized world has been changed because this
one thousandth per cent. have proved beyond the possibility of
question that in intellect there is no sex, that the accumulated
learning of our great past and of our still greater future is the
inheritance of women also. Men have admitted women into
intellectual comradeship and the opinion