Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/198

182 One week later, another business meeting was held in the same house, and in its published proceedings was a resolution introduced by the Rev. Chairman, endorsing Mrs. Nichols, and inviting her "to be present and speak" at a County Convention appointed for a subsequent day. Not long after he sent me, through a brother clergyman, an apology that would have disarmed resentment, had I felt any, toward a man who, having opposed me without discourtesy and retracted by a published resolution, was yet not satisfied without tendering a private apology.

I had achieved a grateful success; license to "plead the cause of the poor and needy," where, ow to do so, without offending old-time ideas of woman's sphere, had seemed to the women under whose direction I had taken the field, the real question at issue. In consideration of existing prejudices, they had suggested the prudence of silence on the subject of Woman's Rights. And here, on the very threshold of the campaign, I had been compelled to vindicate my right to speak for woman; as a woman, to speak for her from any stand-point of life to which nature, custom, or law had assigned her. I had no choice, no hope of success, but in presenting her case as it stood before God and my own soul. To neither could I turn traitor, and do the work, or satisfy the aspirations of a true and loving woman.

For more than a quarter of a century earnest men had spoken, and failed to secure justice to the poor and needy, "appointed to destruction "by the liquor traffic. They had failed because they had denied woman's right to help them, and taken from her the means to help herself. In speaking for woman, I must be heard from a domestic level of legal pauperism disenchanted of all political prestige. In appealing to the powers that be, I must appeal from sovereigns drunk to sovereigns sober, — with eight chances in ten that the decision would be controlled by sovereigns drunk.

To impress the paramount claim of women to a no-license law, without laying bare the legal and political disabilities that make them "the greatest sufferers," the helpless victims of the liquor traffic, was impossible. It would have been stupidly unwise to withhold what with a majority of voters is the weightier consideration, that in alienating from women their earnings, governments impose upon community taxes for the support of the paupered children of drunken fathers, whose mothers would joyfully support and train them for usefulness; and who, as a rule, have done so when by the death or divorce of the husband they have regained the control of their earnings and the custody of their children. Thus proving, that