Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/788

 Feeling on this subject is more acute than it needs to be because the suffrage atmosphere just now is highly charged with electricity. The Shafroth Amendment is a first-rate little amendment and the sooner it passes the better.

The National Convention at Nashville in November, 1914, after many hours of heated discussion, finally adopted a resolution that it should be the policy of the association to "support by every means within its power the Anthony Amendment and to support such other legislation as the National Board might authorize to the end that the Anthony resolution should become law." (Minutes, p. 26.) At the convention of December, 1915, in Washington it was voted that the last year's action in regard to the Shafroth Amendment be rescinded; that the association re-indorse the Anthony Amendment and that no other be introduced by it during the coming year. (Minutes, page 43.) This ended the matter for all time.

After a brief sketch of the condition of the world after a year and a half of the war in Europe, the address continued:

As an association we are confronted through the eternal law of progress by changes in our methods such as we have not met since the union of the two national societies in 1890. Our enlarged and expanding status as an association, the new and varied duties which devolve upon us and the innumerable demands increasing with the accumulation of means and workers call for a new kind of service in leadership. Political necessity has supplanted the reform epoch; the reapers of the harvest have replaced the ploughman and seed sower, each equally needed in the process of the cultivation and the development of an ideal as in the harvest of the land. When this movement began its pioneers were reformers, people who saw a vision and dreamed dreams of the time when all mankind should be free and all human beings have an equal opportunity under the law. Other reformers became possessed by it, and, following it in the spirit of Him who cried, "I was not disobedient to the Heavenly vision," they went forth proclaiming it to the world, knowing that misunderstanding, misrepresentation and persecution would combine to make the task difficult. It was not that they sought persecution but that they loved justice and freedom more than escape from it—these pioneers of the greatest political reform which history recounts. Year after year the task has been carried forward until the time has come when "new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth," and the idealist and the reformer are supplanted in our movement by the politician. Our cause has passed beyond the stage of academic discussion and has entered the realm of practical politics. The time has come when our organized machinery must be political in its character and work along political lines directed by political leaders

The United States is looked upon as being the most powerful neutral nation, which with its high human ideal is the best equipped to present its good offices in mediation between the warring nations of the East, but is this true? What better preparation could it make than by removing from within its own borders the very cause which led to the present barbarous conditions across the sea?

How can the United States, in any spirit of a truly great nation, offer its services as mediator when it is following the same line of action towards its own people? How can it plead for justice in the East when it denies this to its own women?' How can it claim that written agreements between nations are binding when it violates the fundamental principles of its own National