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 character; they represent that element of American womanhood which is winning its own way successfully in the great world of competition and strenuous endeavor; influencing the minds and molding the public opinion of the country through their books and through the press. There may be those among you, gentlemen, who are opposed to suffrage, but I am sure there is not one who would not be glad to know that his daughter was a woman of this type if it so happened that he was obliged to leave her unprovided for. There is one girl, Jean Webster, who made $4,000 on one book the year she left college. There is one woman, Mary Johnston, who was paid $20,000 in advance royalties on one book before a word of it was printed. A number of distinguished writers had signed the general petition before the writers' blank had reached them, among them Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, Ernest Thompson Seton, Julia Ward Howe, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Ellen Glasgow.

Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, former corresponding secretary of the National Suffrage Association, in speaking of the petition told of one containing 10,000 names which had been gathered in Indiana years ago and presented to the Legislature by Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace, often referred to as the mother pictured in "Ben Hur." It was treated with the utmost contempt, one member saying, "These 10,000 women have about as much influence as that many mice." This experience sent that eloquent woman to the suffrage platform for the rest of her life. Mrs. Avery urged the committee to give a favorable report on this great petition as the first step toward making the influence of the thousands of women who had signed it of more value than that of so many mice. [For the address of Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, see Appendix for this chapter.

U. S. Senator John F. Shafroth of Colorado, a consistent supporter of woman suffrage from the very beginning of the movement for it in his State twenty years before, made an address to the committee which was printed in a pamphlet of seven pages and made a part of the propaganda of the National Association. Limited space permits only brief extracts, which give little idea of its compelling arguments.

An eminent writer has said that all powers of government are either delegated or assumed; that all not delegated are assumed and all assumed powers are usurpations. The powers of government by