Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/402

 dered the soldiers to filter and boil their drinking water, without furnishing any filters or any vessels to boil it in? It is said that suffragists do not know how to keep house. If so, the men who managed the war must all be suffragists.

But Clara Barton and the women nurses have won golden opinions from every one. If any man had: given a tithe of what Helen Gould did, he could have had any office in the gift of the administration. So could she, if she had been a voter. She might even have been Secretary of War.

We raise our sons to die not for their country—no woman grudges her sons to her country—but to die unnecessarily of disease and neglect, because of red tape.

History furnishes no parallel to the women of America during the last year's war. They were fully alive to its issues, intelligently conversant with its causes, its purposes and possibilities; they studied' camp locations, conditions and military rules; and through the hand the heart found constant expression, as many a company of grateful boys can testify. The experience of this war ought to have effectually destroyed the last trace of medieval sentiment concerning the propriety of women mixing in the affairs of government, and also the last shadow of doubt as to the expediency of recognizing them as voters.

Mrs. Josephine K. Henry (Ky.) made an address sparkling with the epigrams for which she was noted, entitled A Plea for the Ballot:

The light and the eager interest in the faces of American women show that they are going somewhere; and when women have started for somewhere, they are harder to head off than a comet.All roads for women lead to suffrage, even if they do not know it. We are Daughters of Evolution, and who can stop old Dame Evolution?We must live up to our principles, or, as a nation, we are not going to live at all. Then it will be time for Liberty to throw down her torch, and go out of the enlightening business."Woman's sphere'—these are the two hardest-worked words in the dictionary.They call in the mental and moral wreckage of foreign nations to help rule us. A man was asked, "How are you going to vote on the constitution?" He answered: "My constitution's mighty poorly; my mother was feeble before me." There is deep tragedy in giving such men control of the lives and property of American women.There is not so much the matter with the U. S. Constitution as with the constitutions of some of our statesmen.It is not an expansion of territory that we need so much as an expansion of justice to our own women.American men have had a hard struggle for their own liberty, and some of them are afraid there will not be liberty enough to go around.What relation is woman to the State? She is a very poor relation, yet her tax-money is demanded promptly.