Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/255

 right to do the best you can for yourself. One of the greatest of those philosophers and writers, Herbert Spencer, has accorded to woman the same natural rights as to man. I believe every thoughtful man in the United States to-day concedes that point.

The ballot has been for man a means of defending these natural rights. Even now in some localities of the world those rights are still defended by the revolver, as in former days, but in peaceable communities the ballot is the weapon by means of which they are protected. We find, as women citizens, that when we are wronged, when our rights are infringed upon, inasmuch as we have not this weapon with which to defend them, they are not considered, and we are very many times imposed upon. We find that the true liberty of the American people demands that all citizens to whom these rights have been accorded should have that weapon. win'

Mrs. Lida A. Meriwether (Tenn.): "Oh, Cæsar, we who are about to die salute you!" was the gladiators' cry in the arena, standing face to face with death and with the Roman populace. All over this fair city, youth and beauty, freshness and joy, stand with welcoming hands, calling you to all pleasures of ear and eye, of soul and sense. But here, into the inner sanctuary of your deepest, gravest thought, come, year after year, a little band of women over whose heads the snows of many winters and of many sorrows have sifted. Here "we who are about to die salute you." We do not come asking for gifts of profit or preferment for ourselves; for us the day for ban or benison has almost passed. But we ask for greater freedom, for better conditions for the children of our love, whom we shall so soon leave behind. In the short space allowed each petitioner we have not time to ask for much. But in my State the grandmothers of seventy are growing weary of being classed with the grandsons of seven. They fail to find a valid reason why they should be relegated to perpetual legal and political childhood.

Years ago, when the bugle call rang out over this unhappy land, as the men rallied to the standard of their State, we, the wives and mothers, who had no voice in bringing about those cruel conditions, were called to give up our brightest and best for cannons' food. We furnished the provisions, ministered on the battlefield, nursed in the hospital; we, equally with our brothers, regarded "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" only as gifts held in trust to spend and be spent for home and State. And to-day when we see the wayfaring man, who probably hails from a penal institution of the Old World, who honors no home, no country and no political faith, freely enjoying the right to say who shall make and who shall enforce the laws by which we women are governed, we grow weary of being classed as perpetual aliens upon our nation's soil.

The honest, industrious, bread-winning women of Tennessee do not enjoy the knowledge that the pauper of their State is their political superior. Four years ago we saw it practically demonstrated that when a great moral issue was at stake the male pauper could cast his ballot without hindrance from the penal code, but if the widow or the single woman, who earned and owned property and