he tariff." On the same day
the committee accorded a deferential hearing to a deputation of
lumbermen.... This discrimination against woman, the vague
feeling that she has been allowed to get on too fast, to get out
of control, that she has slipped into too large activities while
the good man slept, has come upon us at the very time when
Scandinavia and Germany and England are getting rid of their
simian chivalry. It is notorious that America, which once was the
progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state
in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college
women should stand solid against the blind superstition, whose
mother is fear and whose father is egoism, that women can not be
trusted in public affairs....

The report of Mr. Blackwell on Presidential suffrage was accepted by a
rising vote and his report as chairman of the Committee on Resolutions
was adopted, as usual, without change.[61] For many years he had
served as chairman of these committees. His constitutional argument
for the right of Legislatures to grant women a vote for presidential
electors always stood unchallenged and his faith that they would do
this was eventually justified. One of the founders of the American
Suffrage Association in 1869, he had not during forty years missed
attending a national suffrage convention, first with his wife, Lucy
Stone, and later with his daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. He had
never seemed in better health and spirits than at this one in Seattle
but two months later, on September 7, he died at the age of 84, a
great loss to the cause of woman suffrage. (Memorials in next
chapter.)

The Legislative Evening was in charge of the State suffrage
association, Mrs. De Voe in the chair, and it was the intention to
have those members of the Legislature who were principally responsible
for submitting the amendment address the convention but an extra
session at that time spoiled this program. The Hon. Alonzo Wardell
spoke for Charles R. Case, president of the State Federation of Labor,
which was strongly in favor of the amendment, he said, and had votes
enough to carry it if the members would go to the polls. Mrs. Lord
represented the Grange, which she said could be depended on for an
affirmative vote. Miss Parker gave a graphic description of the
"illegal and dishonorable methods" by which the vote was taken away
from the women whil