Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/379

 uneducated women she said: "The ignorant vote is not the working vote. Working women in great organized factories have been having, since they began that work, an education for the suffrage. They are not the ignorant voters nor are wives of workingmen; at least, they know in part what they need to safeguard themselves and their homes. The ignorant vote is the complacent, blind vote of men and of the feminine 'influence' that moves them, which disregards the real problems of setting safe and wholesome standards of life and labor and education and spends its strength in looking backward, insisting upon precedents without seeing that, good and enduring as they may be, all precedents must be daily retranslated into the setting of today. "Women must vote for their own souls' good," she said, "and they must vote to protect the family. The newer conception of the family is one which depends upon giving to both parents the fullest expression on all those matters of common concern."

The address closed with a fine peroration Pass on the Torch! In the evening the officers of the association gave a largely attended reception to delegates and friends in the banquet hall of Hotel Walton.

The closing night of the convention was one long to be remembered. There was the same vast, eager audience: Dr. Shaw presided and on the platform was the distinguished Apostle of Peace, winner of the Nobel prize, Baroness Bertha von Suttner, and Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, just returned from a two-years' trip around the world. The meeting was opened by the Rt. Rev. James Henry Darlington, bishop of central Pennsylvania, whose brief address was of great value to the cause. He congratulated the American people on the fact that four more States had been added to the ever-growing list of those which had given the suffrage to women and he called upon all observers to notice that no State which had once voted in woman suffrage had ever voted it out. Once in use, local opposition to it ceased by reason of the self-evident good results. He offered congratulation to those who were humble privates in the ranks and to the famous and brave leaders who organized the victories, Elizabethan and Victorian eras are the most distinguished for philanthropic, literary and economic advancement in the whole