Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/408

 The memorial service was closed with prayer by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, who voiced the gratitude for the inspiration of such lives as these and the hope that this generation might carry the work on to its full fruition.

The keynote to the speeches and action of this convention was the status of women in our new possessions. At a preliminary meeting of the Business Committee, held in the home of Mrs. Chapman Catt at Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, N. Y., Jan. 2, 1899, the following "open letter" had been prepared and sent to every member of Congress:


 * We respectfully request that in the qualifications for voters in the proposed Constitution for the new Territory of Hawaii the word "male" be omitted.

The declared intention of the United States in annexing the Hawaiian Islands is to give them the benefits of the most advanced civilization, and it is a truism that the progress of civilization in every country is measured by the approach of women toward the ideal of equal rights with men.

Under barbarism the struggle for existence is entirely on the physical plane. The woman freely enters the arena and her failure or success depends wholly upon her own strength. When life rises to the intellectual plane public opinion is expressed in law. Justice demands that we shall not offer to women emerging from barbarism the ball and chain of a sex disqualification while we hold out to men the crown of self-government.

The trend of civilization is closely in the direction of equal rights for women. [Then followed a list of the gains for woman suffrage.]

The Hon. John D. Long, Secretary of the Navy, calls the opposition to woman suffrage a "slowly melting glacier of bourbonism and prejudice." The melting is going on steadily all over our country, and it would be most inopportune to impose upon our new possessions abroad the antiquated restrictions which we are fast discarding at home.

We, therefore, petition your Honorable Body that, upon whatever conditions and qualifications the right of suffrage is granted to Hawaiian men, it shall be granted to Hawaiian women.

Notwithstanding this appeal, and special petitions also from the Suffrage Associations of the forty-five States, our Congress provided a constitution in which the word "male" was introduced more frequently than in the Constitution of the United States or