Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/484

 political enfranchisement. This place is the temple of your liberties; here, if anywhere, should be spoken the words of wisdom and be enacted just and equal laws. However grand the words may be which have been spoken here, may they become grander and better and deeper, until to all your other glories shall be added that of having set the crown of freedom upon the heads of the women of your State!

Only a few gleanings from the many speeches can be given. Professor W. H. Carruth, of the Kansas State University, said in part:

We are likely to meet some good-natured person who will say: "Why, yes, I am in favor of woman suffrage, but I don't see that there is any need of it here in Kansas. If I were in Rhode Island or Connecticut, where there are so many laws unjust to women, I would petition and work for it; but I don't see that it is worth while to make a fuss about it here." Now, what can be said to such a person? Weapons are both defensive and aggressive. The ballot has both uses. What would a herdsman say if you told him his sheepfold was all that was needed, and refused to give him a gun? What would the farmer say if you gave him a cultivator but no plough? What would Christianity be if it had only the Ten Commandments and not the Golden Rule?

He who thinks the ballot is given simply as a means of protection—protection in a limited sense, against fraud and violence—has but a limited conception of the duties of American citizenship. The old let-alone theory of government has been found a failure, and instead of it people are coming to think that government is good to do anything that it can do best—just as they have already learned that it is proper for woman to do anything that she can do well. Ina word, as Mrs. Howe said the other evening, the ballot is a means of getting things done which we want done.

When your good friend with a kind and prosperous husband, a pleasant home and nothing lacking which better laws could secure for her, says she thinks women are already pretty well treated and she doesn't know that she would care for the ballot, ask her how she would feel if she were a teacher and were expected to work beside a man, equal work and equal time, he to get $60 and she $40 a month? Ask her whether she would not want to have a vote then? Isn't this a case, kind mistress of a home, where you should remember those in bonds as bound with them? I very much fear there never will be a time when all the good people in this world can dispense with any effective weapon against wrong.

And, beyond this, there are all the offensive, aggressive uses of the ballot. We want a sewer here, a bridge there, a lamp-post or a hydrant yonder. A woman's nose will scent a defective drain where ten men pass it by, but votes get these things looked after. We want a new schoolhouse, or more brains or more fresh air in an old