Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/82

 You can not trust the ballot into the hands of women teachers in the public schools but you give it to men who can not read or write. You can not trust the ballot to women who are controlling millions of money and helping support the country but you give it to loafers and vagabonds who know nothing, have nothing and represent nothing. You can not trust the ballot in the hands of women who are the wives and daughters of your heroes but you give it to those who are willing to sell it for a glass of beer and you trust it in the hands of anarchists. Oh, men, let justice speak and may the public weal demand that this disfranchisement of the noble American women shall be stopped.

Mrs. Catt then introduced to the committee Miss Isabel Campbell, daughter of former Governor Campbell of Wyoming, who in 1869 signed the bill which enfranchised the women of the Territory ; Prof. Theodosia Ammons of the Colorado University of Agriculture and Mrs. Ida M. Weaver, a resident of Idaho. Kach gave a comprehensive report of the practical working of woman suffrage in her State; the large proportion of women who voted; their appointment on boards and-election to offices; the result in improved polling places, better candidates and cleaner politics; higher pay for working women; the advantages to the community; the comradeship between men and women and the general satisfaction of the people with the experiment. Their reports as a whole offered unimpeachable testimony in favor of the enfranchisement of women.

Mrs. Florence Fenwick Miller in her address said:

I have been asked to direct especially my attention to the position of women in England. I hope you, as members of a republic, will be ashamed to hear that the monarchy of England gives its women citizens a great many rights which you deny to yours, that we have had those rights for so many years that nobody talks about them. When I am asked to give you testimony as to the smooth working of the women’s vote in all local affairs, I am at a loss to know what to say, because it runs along so easily and naturally, so like breathing the air in a thoroughly healthy state of the lungs, that there is absolutely nothing to be said. Men and women vote on equal terms and the woman’s vote is as much a matter of course as the man’s.

The local government of England is divided among a number of different bodies. We have the school boards, established in 1870, which have managed the elementary education of the country, now compulsory and free. They spend very large sums of the taxpayers’ money and for them every woman who pays taxes has a vote. Any woman whom the electors choose is entitled to take a seat on them.