Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/378

 she began, "is to show that woman suffrage is a natural and inevitable step in the march of society forward; that instead of being incompatible with child welfare it leads toward it and is indeed the next great service to be rendered for the welfare and ennoblement of the home. A little more than one-third of all the people in this country, something over 29,500,000 in actual numbers, are children under the age of fifteen—that is, still in a state of tutelage; and it is of unbounded importance that nothing be done by the rest of us which will injure this budding growth. So it is right to judge in large measure any proposed change in our social fabric by its probable effect on that dependent third of the race to whom we are pledged, for whose succession it is the work of this generation to prepare. What we propose is to give universal suffrage to women."

Answering the question, "Do we propose a mad revolution?" she traced the development in the position of woman, every step of which was condemned at the time as a dangerous innovation. "It was a revolution when women were given equal property rights over their goods and equal rights over their children," she said. "We must blush that there are States in this country where that revolution is still to be accomplished. I have heard an old Illinois lawyer describe the early efforts to secure equal property rights for women in that State and the constant objection that such laws would destroy the family, that there could be no harmony unless the ownership were all in one person and that person the man. It was feared then, as now, that women would become tyrannical and unbearable if they were allowed too much independence. Do children suffer because their mothers: own property?" She pointed out the necessity for woman's political influence on humanitarian movements and said: "Suffrage for women is not the final word in human freedom but it is the next step in the onward march, because it is the next step in equalizing the rights and balancing the duties of the two types of individuals who make up the human race."

Miss Lathrop showed the need of legislation for all social reforms and how the experience of women beginning with domestic duties carried them forward to a sense of their obligations in community life and a fitness for it. Referring to the