ars. A few years
ago the women of Indiana petitioned for a local-option temperance
law. To-day I believe that they demand a prohibitory law, and
nothing short of that will satisfy them. I am in favor of woman
suffrage. To secure to us this right we must work for it. What
women can do when they try, was shown by the women's exhibit at
the late State Fair. Public sentiment is increasing on our side,
and we intend to show our power at the next Legislature.

Mrs. H. M. TRACY CUTLER said: Many of us have grown old in this
work, and yet some people say, "Why do you still work in a
hopeless cause?" The cause is not hopeless. Great reforms develop
slowly, but truth will prevail, and the work that we have been
doing for thirty years has paid as well as any work that has ever
been done for humanity. The only hope of a nation's salvation
from miserable demagogy lies in woman suffrage. With the
advancement in education and civilization, I say to myself--the
glory of the Lord is shining on women. With the advance in
womanhood there will be an advance in manhood, and this will be
one of the grand results of equal suffrage.

A long argument was then made by Hon. George W. Julian. After the
Convention was called to order at the evening session, the
Committee on Nominations[204] reported.

Miss MARY F. EASTMAN, of Massachusetts, spoke as follows: It has
been said that the greatest study of mankind is man. I do not
know but we shall all believe, before we get through the three
days' session of this congress, that the greatest study of
womankind is woman! Indeed, from being a good deal overlooked in
various ways, she has come to be almost the topic of the age, and
strangely enough is she considered. According to the standpoint
of the observer, woman is a riddle to be solved, a conundrum to
be guessed, a puzzle to be interpreted, a mystery to be
explained, a problem to be studied, a paradox to be reconciled.
She is a toy or a drudge, a mistress or a servant, a queen or a
slave, as circumstances may decide. She is at once an
irresponsible being, who must accept the destiny which comes to
her with as little power of resistance as the thistle-down upon
the wind, or the sea-weed which the tide leaves to bleach on the
rocks or sucks back to engulf in its own u