Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/391

 small bit of the machinery that is to lift the mass of wage-earning women up to a higher plane of self-respect and self-protection but will it not add the balance of power so much needed by the workingmen in their struggle for protective legislation, which will in the end be shared by the women? 'Today women are cheap, unskilled labor and will be until organization and technical training and the responsibility of the vote in their hands develop a consciousness of their social value

The vote and all that it implies will awaken this sense of value. It will give to the wage-earning woman a new status in industry, for men will help to educate her when she is a political as well as an industrial co-worker. As man gave strength to the developing of the institution of the home so woman must be given the opportunity to help man humanize the State. This can be done only when she has the ballot and shares the responsibility.

Representative A. W. Lafferty of Oregon said in his brief five minutes: "TI believe it is not only practicable but that it would be profitable to the United States to extend equal suffrage to men and women. We have had here this morning a practical demonstration of the ability of the women of this country to participate intelligently in the discussion of public questions. I think that we could not make a mistake in placing the ballot in the hand that rocks the cradle. Having only the best interests of this republic at heart, I believe it would be a good thing if fifty of the mothers of this country were in the House of Representatives today and I wish that at least twenty-five of them were in the Senate. You should consider, as lawyers, as statesmen and as historians that in the history of the civilized world in monarchies women have participated in the Government; it is a shame that in a republic like ours, the best form of government that has ever yet been established, women can not, under the present law, actively participate in it."

The address which Representative Edward T. Taylor put into the Congressional Record on this occasion was also printed in a pamphlet of forty pages and until the end of the movement for woman suffrage was a standard document for distribution by the National Association. He said in the introduction:

I want to recite in a plain, conversational way some of my personal experiences and individual observations extending over a period of thirty years of public life, during nearly nineteen years of which we have had equal suffrage in Colorado