Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/838

 822 HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE Yet the older and more conservative body of workers have been no less remarkable. With a forbearance we may all do well to imitate, they quadrupled their own activities. Every class, in- cluding ladies of the nobility, working girls, housewives and professional women, has engaged in the campaign and not a man, woman or child has been permitted to plead ignorance con- cerning the meaning of woman suffrage." Mrs. Catt reviewed at length the "militant" movement in Great Britain, showing how it had awakened interest in votes for women in all quarters of the globe, and recalled the struggle of the barons in wresting the Magna Charta from King John. She then passed to the United States and to the persistent charge that its experiment in universal male suffrage had been a failure, to which she replied : "Although the United States has gathered a population which represents every race; although among its people are the followers of every religion and the subjects of every form of government; although there has been the dead weight of a large ignorant vote, yet the little settlement, which 150 years ago rested upon the eastern shores of the Atlantic a mere colonial possession, has steadily climbed upward until today it occupies a proud position of equality among the greatest gov- ernments of the world. . . . The fact that woman suffrage must come through a referendum to the votes of all men has postponed it but man suffrage in the United States is as firmly fixed as the Rock of Gibraltar. . . ." Tn an eloquent peroration Mrs. Catt said : "Within our Alliance we must try to develop so lofty a spirit of internationalism, a spirit so clarified from all personalities and ambitions and national antagonisms that its purity and grandeur will furnish new in- spiration to all workers in our cause. We must strike a note in this meeting so full of sisterly sympathy, of faith in woman- hood, of exultant hope, a note so impelling, that it will be heard by the women of all lands and will call them forth to join our world's army." The business sessions opened with all the officers present ; over one hundred delegates and alternates from the now sixteen auxil- iary countries ; delegates sent by their governments and fraternal delegates from the International Council of Women, ten National