t assuredly woman suffrage is not one of these. One by
one classes of men have been granted the vote until women are the only
remaining unenfranchised class. States have set up various restrictive
qualifications so that criminality, idiocy, insanity, pauperism,
drunkenness, foreign birth are accepted as ordinary causes of
disfranchisement. Yet not one of these conditions is common to all the
states. The foreigner votes on his first papers in eight states and
a five years' residence will usually secure his naturalization and a
consequent vote in any state. The criminal, idiot and insane are not
denied a vote in several states, and in most a large class of ignorant
un-American men with no comprehension of our problems, our history, or
ideals, are conspicuous voters on election day. Millions of new voters
have entered our country and without the expenditure of time, money or
service have received the vote since the pending Federal Amendment was
first introduced.

For two generations groups of women have given their lives and their
fortunes to secure the vote for their sex and hundreds of thousands of
other women are now giving all the time at their command. No class of
men in our own or any other country has made one-tenth the effort nor
sacrificed one-tenth as much for the vote. The long delay, the
double dealing, the broken faith of political parties, the insult of
disfranchisement of the qualified in a land which freely gives the
vote to the unqualified, combines to produce as insufferable a tyranny
as any modern nation has perpetuated upon a class of its citizens.
The souls of women which should be warm with patriotic love of their
country are growing bitter over the inexplicable wrong their country
is doing them. Hands and heads that should be busy with other problems
of our nation are withheld that they may get the tools with which
to work. Purses that should be open to many causes are emptied into
suffrage coffers until this monumental injustice shall be wiped away.
Woman suffrage is a question of righting a nation-wide injustice, of
establishing a phase of unquestioned human liberty and of carrying out
a proposition to which our nation is pledged; it therefore transcends
all considerations of states rights. This objection comes chiefly
from Southern Democrats, who claim that it is a form of oppression for
three-fourths of the states to foist upon one-fourth measures of
which the minority of states do not approve. Y