Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/393

 This all means that we need another Commission to go to all the lands in which our flag now claims a new power of oversight and control—a Commission other than that so recently sent to the Philippines—to see what may be done to bring order to that distracted group of islands. We need a Commission which shall study domestic rather than political conditions, and which shall look for the undercurrents of social growth rather than the more showy political movements. We should have on that. Commission two archzologists, a man and a woman, and I can name them—Otis T. Mason and Alice C. Fletcher.

An earnest discussion followed this paper, in which Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.), Mrs. Helen Philleo Jenkins (Mich), Henry B. Blackwell (Mass.), Miss Octavia W. Bates (Mich.), Miss Martha Scott Anderson (Minn.), and Miss Anthony took part:


 * Whatever power in government may be given to the men of our new possessions in selecting their rulers, let the same privilege be accorded the women. It may be said that the women are ignorant, and need yet to be held in subjection—that they are unfit to have a voice in the new order of things. Let us not be deceived. Probably the women are no more ignorant and stupid than the masses of men in these newly acquired regions— excepting always the few men whom circumstances have developed. The ignorant mother can guide her child quite as safely as its ignorant father. Men and women in all nations and tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals and behavior of the community make the standard of even unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a sex supremacy that it may take long centuries to overcome.

Thousands of dollars are expended on a military commission; it is sent to investigate the commercial possibilities, the financial opportunities, in remote lands; but the army, the commerce, the finance are not all there is of a nation. There are more vital interests—there is something which lies at the very base of the nation, without which it could not exist—the homes, the women and the children. It is the social conditions that need special consideration in our country's dealings with these new lands.

Miss Bates:In the presence of the events which have transpired during the past year, and in all the discussions pertaining to the new peoples who have suddenly become our protégés, seldom if ever does one hear a word about the women, who, all will admit, are a most important factor in the civilization— or the lack of it—which we have taken under our control.

We women are here at this time to do our best to awaken the