Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/543

 She feels it to be her clear duty frankly to state to the convention her conviction on this point. It is her judgment, based upon her own observation this year and a study of the past work on the Federal Amendment, that it will not pass until the national headquarters are in Washington and the National Board as well as the Congressional Committee is in a position to gives its direct attention to the work on this amendment.

A lobby in Washington for special educational purposes may be a good thing but you will have to do special educational and political work in the States if your committee is to achieve political action to the point of a two-thirds vote on the amendment. We appreciate that support has been given to it by many suffragists and a number of State chairmen and presidents but there has not been the intensive, persistent, determined congressional activity in the States which there must be before the amendment can be passed and ratified. Your committee has done its utmost, I believe, but it can no more put the Federal Amendment through Congress without your activity in the States than a State committee can achieve success without activity in the counties. Activity on the part of a small number of local Washington suffragists is not a sufficient backing for the work of the Congressional Committee. If you propose to secure the Federal Amendment you must work just as hard in the States as you expect it to work in Washington. Without a doubt we can secure the Federal Amendment if the women of this country enthusiastically want their enfranchisement that way

The friendliness of members of Congress toward the National Association and their continued respect for the suffrage movement in this country have been maintained by the dignity, poise and ability of the national lobby. In the many years of my connection with various kinds of organizations I have never served any in which there was more frankness, unity and good fellowship than in the National Board and the National Congressional Committee. That such harmony exists is due to our great president, to whom each is more indebted than all of us together can express. Her visits to Washington did for us what nothing and no one else could do. It was my duty and pleasure always to accompany her to the Capitol, and the unfailing impression of nobility, directness and power which she left upon the men was a joy to witness.

I can not close this report without acknowledging my personal debt to that co-officer who is not on our committee, Miss Hannah J. Patterson. It is but fair to say that had we not had her assistance at hazardous moments the suffrage planks would not be in the two national platforms today. Food, sleep, rest, pleasure, all were day after day given up by this most self-sacrificing officer. She it was who kept with one other [Mrs. Roessing] the lonely vigil the night of June 6 at the door of the Republican Resolutions Committee while it debated for hours its sub-committee's adverse report on the suffrage plank. The crisis in our work for both the planks came in this sub-committee of seven, for we knew that if we lost in Chi-