Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/260

 This was the first appearance at a national suffrage convention of Mrs. Frances Squire Potter, professor of English in the University of Minnesota, and her address on Women and the Vote was one of the ablest ever given before this body which was accustomed to superior addresses. Limited space forbids extended quotation:

Louis XIV said an infamous thing when he declared: "I am the State," but he announced his position frankly. He was an autocrat and he said so. It was a more honest and therefore less harmful position than that of a majority of voters in our country today. Can it help but confuse and deteriorate one sex, trained to believe and call itself living in a democracy, to say silently year by year at the polls, "I am the State"? Can it help but confuse and deteriorate the other sex, similarly trained to acquiescence year after year in a national misrepresentation and a personal no-representation? This fundamental insincerity of our so-called democracy is as insidious an influence upon the minds and morals of our franchised men, our unfranchised women and our young Americans of both sexes, as hypocrisy is to a church member or spurious currency to a bank. It is to be remembered that the evils which are pointed out in our commonwealth today are not the evils of a democracy but of an amorphous something which is afraid to be a democracy. Whether the opposition to women's voting be honestly professed or whether it is concealed under chivalrous idolatry, distrust and skepticism are behind it When pushed to the wall, objectors to woman suffrage now-a-days take refuge behind one of two platitudes: The first is used too often by women whose public activities ought logically to make them suffragists—the assertion that equal suffrage is bound to come in time but that at present there are more pressing needs. "Let us get the poor better housed and fed," these women say. "Let us get our schools improved and our cities cleaned up and then we shall have time to take up the cause of equal suffrage." Is not this a survival of that old vice of womankind, indirection?The suffrage issue should not be put off but should be placed first, as making the other issues easier and more permanent

This brings me to the other platitude. How often we are told, "Women themselves do not want it; when they do it will be given to them." That is to say, when an overwhelming majority of women want what they ought to have, then they can have it. Extension of suffrage never has been granted on these terms. No great reform has gone through on these terms. In an enlightened State wanting is not considered a necessary condition to the granting of education or the extension of any privilege. Such a State confers it in order to create the desire; unenlightened States, like Turkey and Russia, hold off until revolution compels a reluctant, niggardly abdication of tyrannyWe have the conviction that