Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/302

 cism it seems advisable to publish the proceedings in full. The address was as follows:

I am not entirely certain that I ought to have come tonight, but your committee who invited me assured me that I should be welcome even if I did not support all the views which were here advanced. I considered that this movement represented a sufficient part of the intelligence of the community to justify my coming here and welcoming you to Washington. The difficulty I expect to encounter is this—at least it is a difficulty that occurs to me as I judge my own feelings in causes in which I have an intense interest—to wit: that I am always a good deal more impatient with those who only go half-way with me than with those who actually oppose me. Now when I was sixteen years old and was graduated from the Woodward High School in Cincinnati, I took for my subject "Woman Suffrage" and I was as strong an advocate of it as any member of this convention. I had read Mills's "Subjection of Women"; my father was a woman suffragist and so at that time I was orthodox but in the actual political experience which I have had I have modified my views somewhat.

In the first place popular representative government we approve and support because on the whole every class, that is, every set of individuals who are similarly situated in the community, who are intelligent enough to know what their own interests are, are better qualified to determine how those interests shall be cared for and preserved than any other class, however altruistic that class may be; but I call your attention to two qualifications in that statement. One is that the class should be intelligent enough to know its own interests. The theory that Hottentots or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class is fitted for self-government at once or to take part in government is a theory that I wholly dissent from—but this qualification is not applicable here. The other qualification to which I call your attention is that the class should as a whole care enough to look after its interests, to take part as a whole in the exercise of political power if it is conferred. Now if it does not care enough for this, then it seems to me that the danger is, if the power is conferred, that it may be exercised by that part of the class least desirable as political constituents and be neglected by many of those who are intelligent and patriotic and would be most desirable as members of the electorate.

It was at this point the supposed hissing occurred and the President continued:

Now, my dear ladies, you must show yourselves equal to selfgovernment by exercising, in listening to opposing arguments, that degree of restraint without which self-government is impossible. If I could be sure that women as a class in the community, including all the intelligent women most desirable as political constitu-