they are very intelligent
people and sure to be enfranchised before long. If this committee does
not help some other will; it is going to be done and it is for you to
decide whether your daughters will be able to say years from now, 'My
father was one of the men who helped get woman suffrage!' While men of
this country have been running after dollars at a terrific rate in
recent years women have been studying and preparing themselves in
clubs and all sorts of organizations for this right, so that they will
be the most intelligent class--if you call them a class--that was
ever enfranchised in all history. Are you afraid of intelligence? All
we ask is to let the mother heart, the home element, be expressed in
the government.... I beg of you to let all the world know _why_ the
women of the United States, who by hundreds of thousands have
petitioned you to submit this amendment, ought not have at least this
request considered and a report on it made."

Miss Laura J. Graddick, representing a labor union in the District of
Columbia, said during an able and earnest address:

They say that politics is too corrupt for woman to enter the
field as a voter but does she not live under a Government
dominated by politics? Shame on the manhood of our country that
our government housekeeping is so administered that woman can not
come in contact with it and escape contamination.... If our
Government is built on moral law it should be clean enough for a
woman to have a voice in it. We assure you there are no better
house-cleaners than women and the above statement certainly
indicates the need of women in politics. There is no great cry on
the part of men because of the contaminating influences which
woman meets in the business and industrial world. They are not
keeping her out of the various vocations of life because of the
evil which she might encounter. Are not sweat-shop conditions and
overwork and underpaid work evils far more destructive to the
physical, mental and moral welfare of women than any condition in
which suffrage might place them? Because of the great economic
and political changes of the last century the working woman of
to-day is entitled to the same rights accorded the working man in
the political world. These changes have taken her from the home
and brought her into business and industrial life, where she has
bec