the mothers, but because it will be good for the children, good for man, good for all humanity. We are glad to be a part of this movement for a higher civilization. Grand Rapids is noted for its furniture factories, and after equal suffrage is granted it will supply plenty of material for the President's cabinet.
Mrs. Knaggs: I welcome you in behalf of the Michigan E. S. A., representing the women of this State who are especially interested in woman's enfranchisement. We have looked forward to the day when you would bring us the inspiration of one of these great meetings; we needed it. We are told that women are indifferent. Many are so; and nothing can better arouse us than to meet those engaged in this work from so many different places.
An alderman this spring boasted that he had been elected by the votes of eight nationalities. He enumerated seven of them but for some time was unable to think of the eighth. At last he remembered; it was the American. The ballot in the hands of our present voters might be improved by the intelligence that the great body of Michigan women would bring to it. We are beginning to appreciate the solidarity of women. When one State wins suffrage, all the others are gainers by it. The good of this meeting will go abroad over the country.
Mrs. Keating: ....In the happy tone of welcome that you may hear rising from all parts of our State the club women join, with voices 9,000 strong. We have never been happier than now, even during the annual club elections, amid the joy and intelligence of the club ballot. Your fame has preceded you.
Mrs. Benjamin: The W. C. T. U. of Michigan numbers about 9,000 active members, and I bring you the greeting of your white-ribbon sisters. We welcome not only you but your principles, and your avowed determination to conquer before you die. A good mother works in the home, but she would not wish to be forbidden to cross the threshold. For the good of her child, she needs sometimes to cross it. A mother should guard her child outside the home as well as in it. Every mother worthy of the name wishes to protect her own child from vice, and her duty extends to her neighbor's child also. Equal suffrage is coming, friends, and coming soon.
Mrs. Burns: I bring you the welcome of the 45,000 Ladies of the Maccabees. Times have greatly changed in Michigan since seventy years ago, when the Indian squaws did all the manual labor, and the braves limited themselves to the noble task of hunting. There has been a corresponding change in the condition of women all along the line.
In the response of Miss Susan B. Anthony, the national president, she said:
Since our last convention the area of disfranchisement in the possessions of the United States has been greatly enlarged. Our nation has undertaken to furnish provisional governments for Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, Cuba and Porto Rico. Hitherto the settlers of new Territories have been permitted to frame their own provisional governments, which were ratified by Congress, but to-day Congress itself assumes the prerogative of making the laws for the newly-acquired Territories. When the governments for those in the West were organized there had been no practical example of universal suffrage in any one of the older States, hence it might be pardonable for their settlers to ignore the right of the women associated with them to a voice in their governments.
But to-day, after fifty years' continuous agitation of the right of women to vote, and after the demand has been conceded in one-half the States in the management of the public schools; after one State has added to that of the schools the management of its cities; and after four States have granted women the full vote—the universal reports show that the exercise of the suffrage by women has added to their influence, increased the respect of men, and elevated the moral, social and political conditions of their respective commonwealths. With those object-lessons before Congress, it would seem that no member could be so blind as not to see it the duty of that body to have the provisional governments of our new possessions founded on the principle of equal rights, privileges and immunities for all the people, women included. I hope this convention will devise some plan for securing a strong expression of public sentiment on this question, to be presented to the Fifty-sixth Congress, which is to convene on the first Monday of December next....
During the reconstruction period and the discussion of the negro's right to vote Senator Blaine and others opposed the counting of all the negroes in the basis of representation, instead of the old-time three-fifths, because they saw that to do so would greatly increase the power of the white men of the South on the floor of Congress. Therefore the Republican leaders insisted upon the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to secure the ballot to the negro men. Only one generation has passed and yet nearly all of the Southern States have by one device or another succeeded in excluding from the ballot-box very nearly the entire negro vote, openly and defiantly declaring their intention to secure the absolute supremacy of the white race, but there is not a suggestion on their part of allowing the citizens to whom they deny the right of suffrage to be counted out from the basis of representation. Some of the Northern newspapers have been growing indignant upon the subject, declaring that a vote in South Carolina counts more than two votes in New York, in the election of the President and the House of Representatives. It seems to me that a still greater violation of the principle of "the consent of the governed" is practiced in all the States of the Union where women, though disfranchised, are yet counted in the basis of representation, and I think the time has come when this association should make a most strenuous demand for an amendment to the Constitution of the United States forbidding any State thus to count disfranchised citizens....
The increased discussion of the enfranchisement of women in the newspapers throughout the country evidences the larger demand of the public for information on this line, and a vast amount of educational work is being done in this way.... The presentation of the woman question in the New York Sunday Sun each week by Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, with the articles it has elicited from the opposition, is of incalculable value; and when we add to the number of people who read the Sun the vast numbers who read the copies of these articles made by the many newspapers between the two oceans, we see what an immense reading audience is gained by getting our question into that one of the best New York dailies. We must remember that these papers never would have copied Mrs. Harper's or any other literary woman's productions had they been first published in one of our special organs; therefore one very important branch of press work is to gain access to the metropolitan dailies. Then there is the immense work done by Mrs. Elnora M. Babcock for the State of New York, and by the chairmen of the different State press committees, as well as that done by our national organizer from the headquarters. Never has the press of the entire nation been kept so alive with discussions upon the woman suffrage question as during the past year, and my hope is that we may yet have upon every one of the great city papers a strong, educated suffrage woman, as editor of a woman's page or, better still, as writer of suffrage articles to be inserted without a special heading which would advertise to the general reader that they were about women.
Though we have not obtained the suffrage in any of the States where we had hoped to do so during the past year, the failures have been by very small majorities. In South Dakota, where eight years ago a woman suffrage amendment was lost by a majority of over 23,000, at the election of 1898 the opposing majority was reduced to 3,000; while in Washington, where the question was submitted for the second time, it was lost by a majority less than one-half as large as that of nine years ago. In California both Houses of the Legislature passed the School Suffrage Bill, which the Governor refused to sign, repeating the action of 1894. The suffrage bills in the Territorial Legislatures of Oklahoma and Arizona were carried by very fine majorities through both lower Houses, but were lost in both upper Houses (as will be stated by our national organizer, who led our suffrage hosts in each case) through a shameful surrender to the temptation of bribery from the open and avowed enemies of woman's enfranchisement, the liquor organizations.
None of these so-called defeats ought to discourage us in the slightest degree. Our enemies, the women remonstrants, may comfort themselves with the thought that the liquor interest has joined in their efforts, but we surely can solace ourselves with the fact that the very best men voted in favor of allowing women to exercise their right to a voice in the conditions of home and State. So we have nothing to fear but everything to gain by going forward with renewed faith to agitate and educate the public, until the vast majority of men and women are thoroughly grounded in the great principle of political equality....
I thank you, friends, for your cordial words of