Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/618

 civilized world for the last fifty years, with the result that many nations have capitulated and woman suffrage is now established under many flags. That it is still pending in the Congress of the United States is a disgrace to our country and a reflection on the intelligence and progress of our people." She illustrated how the doctrine of State's rights had been ignored by the southern members in their fight for prohibition, led by Mr. Webb of North Carolina, who as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee had also led the opposition to woman suffrage on this same ground. She proved by editorial quotations from southern papers the changing attitude on this point.

The vast number of American men who would be in the army in France at the time of the next election was pointed out and the question was asked: "When the election comes who will do the voting? Every 'slacker' has a vote; every newly-made citizen; every pro-German who cannot be trusted with any kind of war service; every peace-at-any-price man; every conscientious objector and even the alien enemy. It is a risk, a danger, to a nation like ours to send millions of loyal men out of the country and not replace their votes by those of the loyal women left at home." In referring to the "negro problem" in the South Mrs. Catt said:

In talking with some of the members of Congress we have learned that an idea prevails throughout the South that the colored women are more intelligent, ambitious and energetic than the men, and that while it is easy enough to keep the men from exercising too much ambition in the matter of politics, it will not be easy to control the women. When talking with these same men about the white women of the South, I have never known an exception to the rule that they have finally rested their case upon the statement that the women of the South do not want the vote anyway and if they did they would only vote as their husbands do. To say that means what? That the women of the South in the estimate of those men are too weak-minded to have an opinion of their own; it means that they have no independence of character; it means that they have been reduced so far to nonentity that they will only echo their husbands' opinions. Is living in the homes of the white men of the South so degrading to the character of the white women that they really cannot be trusted to have an honest conviction of their own, but that living in the South outside of those homes renders women more ambitious and more intelligent than the men? Do these men realize that they are saying almost in the same breath that the woman is superior to the colored man but that the white woman