Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/504

 it existed he summed up the result by saying: "I am convinced in favor in my mind but my heart is still opposed." "There are members of this committee," she said, "who are governed by their hearts instead of their heads," and she continued:

Gentlemen, this movement has grown bigger and stronger as the years have passed by until today millions of women are asking in all the States for the vote. The president of Cornell University, Dr. Schurman, said that his reason for now aggressively advocating woman suffrage was because he had discovered in studying history that it was never good for a government to have a restless and dissatisfied class; he had made up his mind that the women of the nation did think that they had a grievance, whether they had or not, and he believed that a government was stronger and safer when grievances were relieved.

A few days before the election in order to show that the women wanted to vote there was a parade in New York City and 20,000 marched up Fifth Avenue, among them a great number of public school teachers of the city, 12,000 of whom had contributed to our campaign funds. These women deal with the most difficult problems; they are teaching all that the new-coming people know of citizenship and they were asking their own share in that citizenship. A man whose name is known to every one of you was sitting at the window of a clubhouse watching the women pass hour after hour until at last this great group of teachers, sixteen abreast, marched by with their banners. He looked out upon them and do you think he said, "I am convinced that the women of New York do want to vote and I will help them?" That is what an honorable American citizen, an open-minded man, would have said. Instead he exclaimed: "My God! I never realized what a menace the woman suffrage movement is to this country; we have got to do something next Tuesday to keep the women from getting the vote."

There is not a man on this committee or in this House who can produce a single argument against woman suffrage that will hold water, and the thing that is rousing the women of this land continually and making them realize that our Government visits upon us a daily injustice is that the doors of our ports are left wide open and the men of all the nations on earth are permitted to enter and receive the franchise. In New York City women must ask for it in twenty-four languages

Walter M. Chandler of New York City, a member of the committee, asked Mrs. Catt if she thought a Representative should vote against the mandate of his district, which in his case had given a majority of 2,000 against a State amendment in November, although he himself had spoken and voted for it. A spirited dialogue followed which filled several pages of the printed report,