e the best safeguard of justice.

Mrs. Blake was followed by Mrs. Martha McClellan Brown, of Cincinnati
Wesleyan College, who spoke on Disabilities of Woman. Miss Anthony
read the report from Missouri by Mrs. Virginia L. Minor, who strongly
supported her belief in the constitutional right of women to the
franchise. A letter of greeting was read from Miss Fannie M. Bagby,
managing editor St. Louis _Chronicle_; Miss Phoebe W. Couzins (Mo.)
gave a brilliant address entitled What Answer?

At the evening session the hall was crowded. The speech of Mrs. Belva
A. Lockwood (D. C.), the first woman admitted to practice before the
Supreme Court, was a severe criticism on the disfranchising of the
women in Utah as proposed by bills now before Congress. It was a clear
and strong legal argument which would be marred by an attempt at
quotation.

In an address on Women Before the Law, the report says:

Mrs. Helen M. Gougar of Indiana traced the development of human
liberty as shown in the history of the ballot, which was at first
given to a certain class of believers in orthodox religions, then
to property holders, then to all white men. She showed how class
legislation had been gradually done away with by allowing
believer and unbeliever, rich and poor, white and black, to vote
unquestioned and unhindered, and as a result of this onward march
of justice, the last remaining form of class legislation, now
shown by the sex ballot, must pass away. She declared the
sex-line to be the lowest standard upon which to base a privilege
and unworthy the civilization of the present time. She answered
many of the popular objections to woman suffrage by showing that
if education were to be made the test of the ballot, women would
not be the disfranchised class in America, as three-fifths of all
graduates from the public schools in the last ten years have been
women. If morality were to be made a test, women would do more
voting than men. The ratio of law-abiding women to men is as one
to every 103; of drunken women to drunken men, one to every
1,000. Reasoning from these facts, if sobriety, virtue and
intelligence were necessary qualifications, women enfranchised
would largely reflect these elements in the Government.

At noon on March 6 the delegates were courteously received at the
White House by President Chester A. Arthur.

During the