Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/766

Rh who have not studied the whole history of the cause, we give the following extracts from his message, published February 9, 1871:

The tendency of this age is towards a civil policy wherein political rights will not be affected by social or ethnological distinctions; and from the moral nature of mankind and the experience of States, we may infer that restrictions merely arbitrary and conventional, like those based upon color and sex, cannot last much longer than they are desired, and cannot be removed much sooner than they should be. This consideration should give patience to the reformer, and resignation to the conservative.

Let us have a true republic—a "government of the people, by the people, for the people," and we shall hear no more the oligarchical cry of croaking conservatism calling for a "white man's government"—appealing by this, and like slogans of class and caste to the lowest and meanest principles of human nature, dangerous alike to real republicanism and true democracy. Expediency, that great pretext for the infringement of human rights, no longer justifies us in the retention of a monopoly of political power in our own favored class of "white male citizens."

In the summer of 1871, Mr. Wait and myself removed to Salina, where Mrs. Hannah Wilson resided. She was the only person in this section of Kansas I ever heard of doing any suffrage work between the years of 1867 and 1877. She was a woman of great force of character, and a strong advocate of suffrage. She was born in Hamilton county, Ohio, and came to Salina in 1870. After Miss Anthony lectured in that city in 1877, Mrs. Wilson circulated petitions to the legislature and to congress. She was also active and aggressive in the temperance cause. When she learned of the Lincoln Beacon, and its advocacy of woman suffrage, she wrote an article for the paper, and accompanied it with a kind letter and the price of a year's subscription. Mrs. Wilson was a Quaker, and in her dress and address strictly adhered to the peculiarites of that sect.

Miss Kate Stephens, professor of Greek in the Kansas State University, writes that she has made diligent search during the past summer among the libraries of Topeka and Lawrence for record of suffrage work since the campaign of 1867, and finds absolutely nothing, so that I am reduced to the necessity of writing, principally, of our little efforts here in central Kansas. In the intensely interesting letters of Mesdames Helen Ekin Starrett, Susan E. Wattles, Dr. R. S. Tenney and Hon. J. P. Root, in Vol. II., all written since 1880, I find no mention of any woman suffrage organizations. Mrs. Wattles, of Mound City, says: "My work has been very limited. I have only been able to circulate tracts and papers"; and she enumerates all the woman suffrage papers ever published in America, which she had taken and given away. A quiet, unobtrusive method of work, but one of the most effective; and doubtless to the sentiment created and fostered by this sowing of suffrage literature by Mrs. Wattles, is largely due the wonderful revival which has swept like one of our own prairie fires over south-eastern Kansas during the past year; a sentiment so strong as to need but "a live coal from off the altar" to kindle into a blaze of enthusiasm. This it received in the earnest eloquence of Mrs. Helen M. Gougar, who has twice visited that portion of the State. All these writers express their faith in a growing interest in the suffrage cause, and, some of them, the belief that if the question were again submitted to a vote of the people, it would carry.

In our State suffrage convention, June, 1884, among the demands which