Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/533

 it now," she exclaimed, and then turning to the President with her irresistible smile she finished, "and we want it to come in your administration!' He smiled and bowed and the whole audience rose in a sea of waving handkerchiefs as he took his' departure. The President of the United States had said: "Your cause is going to prevail; I have come to fight with you; we shall not quarrel as to the method!"

The other speeches of the evening were all of a high order. Mrs. Robins, as always, made an unanswerable argument for giving women wage earners the protection of the ballot. "In the Children's Bureau," Miss Lathrop said, "we have come to see the close connection between the welfare of mother and child. Because we are so concerned for the children we asked a physician to take those vast, mysterious volumes of the census and look up the facts about the mortality of mothers. Last year in the United States more than 15,000 women lost their lives carrying on the life of the race. The death rate from other things, such as typhoid and diphtheria, has been cut in half but between 1900 and 1913 maternal mortality was not lessened but seemingly increased; yet this waste of life is just as preventable as those diseases, for medical science has shown that with proper care the dangers of childbirth can be made very small. Just as fast as women are allowed a voice in public affairs it is their duty to see that no mother and child shall perish for lack of care. Every country should have a mother and child welfare center. When a memorial was lately proposed for a woman who had died in the war, a well-known man said: 'We can enfranchise her sex in tribute to the valor which she proved that it possessed.' It is not too much to give suffrage to women in tribute to the 15,000 who are dying every year in this great duty and service; yet we do not ask the ballot for women as a reward but because, as a duty and a service, we ought to ask for it"

"Woman suffrage is needed in the interest of good morals," was the keynote of Dr. Davis's address, who said:

You cannot legislate righteousness into the human heart but you can reduce to a minimum the temptations that are offered to youth. To a large extent you can stop commercialized vice and the manufacture of criminals. I am not one of those who think that the