Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/572

 charades, sing and do everything under the sun to raise money to buy tobacco for the men in the trenches, while the men who want us to do this have a cigar in their mouth at the time they are asking it! I said that if men want the soldiers to have tobacco, let them have smokeless days and furnish it! If they would conserve one single cigar a day and send it to the men in the trenches the soldiers would have all they would need and the men at home would be a great deal better off. If we have to eat rye flour to send wheat across the sea they must stop smoking to send smokes across the sea. There is no end to the things that women are asked to do. I know this is true because I have read the newspapers for the last six months to get my duty before me. The first thing we are asked to do is to provide the enthusiasm, inspiration and patriotism to make men want to fight, and we are to send them away with a smile! That is not much to ask of a mother! We are to maintain a perfect calm after we have furnished all this inspiration and enthusiasm, "keep the home fires burning." keep the home sweet and peaceful and happy, keep society on a level, look after business, buy enough but not too much and wear some of our old clothes but not all of them or what would happen to the merchants?We are going to rise as women always have risen to the supreme height of patriotic service

The Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense now asks for your cooperation, that we may be what the Government would have us be, soldiers at home, defending the interests of the home, while the men are fighting with the gallant Allies who are laying down their lives that this world may be a safe place and that men and women may know the meaning of democracy, which is that we are one great family of God. That, and that only, is the ideal of democracy for which our flag stands.

The National Anti-Suffrage Association took this time to hold its one day's annual convention in a Washington hotel and reelect for president Mrs. James W. Wadsworth, Jr., wife of the New York Senator, and elect as secretary Mrs. Robert Lansing, wife of the Secretary of State. Mrs. Wadsworth at this time sent to the members of Congress and circulated widely a pamphlet entitled Consider the Facts, in which she charged the suffragists with being pacifists and Socialists and asserted that the recent New York victory was due to the Socialist vote. Miss Mary Garrett Hay, who was chairman of the campaign committee in New York City, where the victory was won, expressed her opinion from the platform in this fashion:

Senator Wadsworth and his wife announced that they weren't going to give any entertainments till the war was over, nevertheless