the New York Conferences. On the principle
of lay delegation, the women of the Church were granted the right of
suffrage; presently they appeared in the Quarterly Conference, to vote
as class-leaders, stewards, and Sunday-school superintendents; and it
created a little excitement, a feverish state of feeling in the Church,
and the General Conference simply passed a resolution or a rule
interpreting that action on the part of women claiming this privilege
in the Quarterly Conference as being a "right," and it was continued.
Presently, as the right of suffrage of women passed on and grew, they
voted in the Electoral Conferences, and there was no outcry made against
it. I have yet to hear of any Bishop in the Church, or any presiding
elder, or any minister challenging the right of women to vote in
Electoral Conferences or Quarterly Conferences; and yet for sixteen
years they have been voting in these bodies; voting to send laymen here
to legislate; to send laymen to the General Conference to elect Bishops
and Editors and Book Agents and Secretaries. They come to where votes
count in making up this body; they have been voting sixteen years, and
only now, when the logical result of the right of suffrage that the
General Conference gave to women appears and confronts us by women
coming here to vote as delegates, do we rise up and protest. I believe
that it is at the wrong time that the protest comes. It should have come
when the right to vote was granted to women in the Church. It is sixteen
years too late, and as was very wisely said by Dr. Potts, the objection
comes not so much from the Constitution of the Church as from the
"constitution of the men," who challenge these women.

Now, sir, another parallel. You take the United States Government just
after the war, when the colored people of the South, the freedmen of our
land, unable to take care of themselves, their friends, that had fought
the battles of the war, in Congress determined that they should be
protected, if no longer by bayonets and cannon, that they should
be protected by placing the ballot in their hands, and the ballot was
placed in the hands of the freedman of the South by the action of the
National Congress, Congress submitting a constitutional amendment to the
legislatures of the States; and when enough of them had voted in favor
of it, and the President had signed the bill, it became an amendment to
the Constitution of the United States, granting to the