Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/470

 glad to have so high an authority that the good time is not only coming but that it has at last arrived—and through the Democratic party!

Again, in this simple, plain, seemingly frank statement of the Secretary of State, he says:"Nothing will be encouraged away from home that is forbidden here." Yet, away from home, he says, the fixed foreign policy is that "the people shall have such officers as they desire," and that these officers must have "the consent of the governed." That is precisely what we women demand. Are the Mexican peons more to our Government than are the women of America? If the Mexican officials must be disciplined, unless they are ready to admit that "the consent of the governed must be obtained" before there can be a legitimate government which we can recognize, how it is possible for you and for the President and for the State Department absolutely to ignore or refuse the same ethical and political principle here at home for one-half of all the people, who form what you call and hold up to the world as a republic?

No one who lives, who ever lived, who ever will live understands or really accepts and believes in a republic which denies to women the right of consent by their ballots to that government. Such a position is unthinkable and the time has come when an aristocracy of sex must give place to a real republic or the absurdity of the position, as it exists, will make us the laughing stock of the world. Let us either stop our pretence before the nations of the earth of being a republic and having "equality before the law" or else let us become the republic that we pretend to be.

This concluded the hearing for the suffrage associations and as the "antis" also had asked for one they occupied the afternoon. Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge, the president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, said in opening the discussion: "We begin to hear from all over the country a very decided demand for help. The women are beginning to be frightened. They are frightened at exactly the same sort of thing by which the suffragists try to frighten you men— noise—so that in many States women are beginning to organize for the first time against suffrage. We are here today rather against our wishes. We did not want to bother you men again because the matter has been pretty well settled for this session of Congress at least. But the suffragists had demanded a hearing of you gentlemen, and so we asked you to hear us, and you have very courteously extended to us that privilege. We are here to represent the majority of women still quiet but not going