and soul.

It is a common remark that unless some new element is infused into
our political life our nation is doomed to destruction. What more
fitting element than the noble type of American womanhood,
who have taught our Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen the
rudiments of all they know.

Think of all the foreigners and all our own native-born ignorant
men who can not write their own names or read the Declaration of
Independence making laws for such women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony. Think of jurors drawn from these ranks to
watch and try young girls for crimes often committed against them
when the male criminal goes free. Think of a single one of these
votes on election day outweighing all the women in the country. Is
it not humiliating for me to sit, a political cipher, and see the
colored man in my employ, to whom I have taught the alphabet, go
out on election day and say by his vote what shall be done with my
tax money. How would you like it?

When we think of the wives trampled on by husbands whom the law
has taught them to regard as inferior beings, and of the mothers
whose children are torn from their arms by the direct behest of
the law at the bidding of a dead or living father, when we think
of these things, our hearts ache with pity and indignation.

If mothers could only realize how the laws which they have no
voice in making and no power to change affect them at every point,
how they enter every door, whether palace or hovel, touch, limit,
and bind, every article and inmate from the smallest child up, no
woman, however shrinking and delicate, can escape it, they would
get beyond the meaningless cry, "I have all the rights I want."
Do these women know that in most States in the Union the shameful
fact that no woman has any legal rights to her own child, except
it is born out of wedlock! In these States there is not a line
of positive law to protect the mother; the father is the legal
protector and guardian of the children.

Under the laws of most of the States to-day a husband may by his
last will bequeath his child away from its mother, so that she
might, if the guardian chose, never see it again.

The husband may have been a very bad man, and in a moment of
anger made the will. The guardian he has appointed may turn out a
ma