Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/590

 papers, oath of allegiance as qualification for citizenship, schools of citizenship in every city ward and rural district and an educational requirement for voting.

This comprehensive and convincing address is given in part in the chapter on The League of Women Voters, by Mrs. Nettie Rogers Shuler, corresponding secretary. It showed beyond question the great work that awaited the action of women endowed with political power and it swept away all doubts of the necessity for this new organization to which Mrs. Catt and her committee had given so much time and thought. Throughout the convention the League was the dominating feature, meetings being held daily to discuss its organization, constitution, objects, methods, officers, etc.

At the close of Mrs. Catt's address Mrs. Guilford Dudley of Tennessee, with a group of sixteen women from as many southern States came to the platform and with eloquent words presented her and Dr. Shaw with large framed parchments on which President Wilson's appeal to the Senate for the submission of the Federal Suffrage Amendment Sept. 30, 1918, was beautifully wrought in illuminated letters by the artist Scapecchi. At Mrs. Catt's request Dr. Shaw made the response for both of them.

Tuesday morning the convention was cordially welcomed to the city by Mrs. George Gellhorn, president of the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League and chairman of local arrangements. There were present 329 delegates, seventeen officers and three chairmen of standing committees. The chair announced that because of the crowded program the separate reports of officers and committee chairmen, which always had been read to the conventions, would be replaced with a general report of the year's work by Mrs. Shuler, chairman of Campaigns and Surveys. This report was a remarkably comprehensive survey of the varied work of the association. After recounting the gains in the States she said:

Our question is now political. The past year has seen suffrage by Federal Amendment endorsed by twenty-one Democratic and twenty Republican State conventions; by all those of the minor parties and by many State Central Committees, while many other have approved the principle of equal suffrage by a large vote In July, 1918, our second vice-president, Miss Mary Garrett