Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/291

 Later the work was removed to Washington and headquarters established there to finish the petition by 1910.

The report of Mrs. Lucretia L. Blankenburg (Penn.), chairman of the Committee on Civil Rights, showed the usual painstaking year's work. Her letters to all the State presidents for information had brought answers from twenty-two and eleven of these showed advanced legislation for women and children. In some of them it was amended labor laws or new ones; in others for a Juvenile Court, for improving the position of teachers, for the advantage of children in the public schools, for property rights of wives. Maine reported nearly a dozen such new laws. Minnesota was in the lead with thirty Acts of the Legislature.

Mrs. Mary E. Craigie (N. Y.), chairman of the Committee on Church Work, introduced her excellent report by saying: "President Taft recently said in a public address: 'Christianity and the spirit of Christianity are the only basis for the hope of modern civilization and the growth of popular self-government.' Women are to-day and always have been the mainstay and chief support of the churches and the leaders in all great moral reforms; yet as a disfranchised class they are powerless to aid in bringing about any reforms that depend upon legislative or governmental action and the church is thereby deprived of more than two-thirds of its power to help extend civic righteousness throughout the land. Now that there is a world-wide movement among women to. demand the political power to do their part in the world's work, they have a right to ask and to receive from ministers and from all Christian people support and help in working for this greatest of all reforms." Mrs. Craigie told of addressing the ministerial association of Canada at Toronto, where fifteen minutes had been allotted to her but by unanimous insistence she was obliged to keep on for an hour. An interesting discussion followed, after which an endorsement of the principle of woman suffrage was unanimously voted. She spoke at a meeting of the Dominion Temperance Alliance, where there were 600 delegates, many of them clergymen, and a resolution by the chairman endorsing the woman suffrage bill then before the Provincial Legislature was carried without a dissenting vote. Reports were included of the good