Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/127

 considered the Wage Earner and the Ballot, her handsome presence, fine humor and long experience rendering her an unusually attractive speaker. "The opponents of our cause," she said, "whether they be of the fair sex or the unfair sex, seem to think that we regard the extension of the suffrage to women as a panacea for all evils in this world and the next. No honest suffragist has ever taken that ground. I can not endorse any such general or sweeping statement but I feel that my experience in investigating the condition of women wage-earners warrants the assertion that some of the evils from which they suffer would not exist if the women had the right to place their votes in the ballot-box." She compared the industrial and educational situation where women voted with that of States where they did not and showed how women were excluded from official positions because disfranchised, giving conclusive instances of the discrimination in her own State. "I feel that not only on account of the women wage-earners should women be accorded the ballot," she said, "but also because they are very largely the spenders of all family incomes and as such they have the right to the assurance that what they buy is free from adulteration and has been produced under clean, wholesome and humane conditions. For this right the Consumers' League persistently contends but it can be only partially successful, in my opinion, so long as it depends entirely upon moral suasion, while manufacturers and merchants have the voting power to hold in terror over its administration."

Mrs. Lucia Ames Mead, president of the Massachusetts State Suffrage Association and a leader in the movement for peace and arbitration, was on the program to talk of Woman's Work for Peace. "J am not going to speak of any philanthropy," she began, "but of something much more far-reaching and radical, which will make three-fourths of our philanthropy needless." She then made an impassioned plea for a world organization of the forces that would conduce to peace. Representative government was the first step, she said, and the establishment of a World Court was the next. The achievement of an International Advisory Congress might be the third. "A simultaneous effort must be made," she declared, "to arrange arbitration treaties with every nation on earth, referring all questions that cannot be settled by diplo-