so that when a mayor, a
member of the common council, a supervisory justice of the peace,
a district attorney, a judge on the bench even, shall go before
the people of that city as a candidate for the suffrages of the
people he shall not only be compelled to look to the men who
frequent the grog-shops, the brothels, and the gambling houses,
who will vote for him if he is not in favor of executing the law,
but that he shall have to look to the mothers, the sisters, the
wives, the daughters of those deluded men to see what they will do
if he does not execute the law.

We want to make of ourselves a balance of political power. What we
need is the power to execute the laws. We have got laws enough.
Let me give you one little fact in regard to my own city of
Rochester. You all know how that wonderful whip called the
temperance crusade roused the whisky ring. It caused the whisky
force to concentrate itself more strongly at the ballot-box than
ever before, so that when the report of the elections in the
spring of 1874 went over the country the result was that the
whisky ring was triumphant, and that the whisky ticket was elected
more largely than ever before. Senator Thurman will remember
how it was in his own State of Ohio. Everybody knows that if my
friends, Mrs. ex-Governor Wallace, Mrs. Allen, and all the women
of the great West could have gone to the ballot-box at those
municipal elections and voted for candidates, no such result would
have occurred; while you refused by the laws of the State to the
women the right to have their opinions counted, every rumseller,
every drunkard, every pauper even from the poor-house, and every
criminal outside of the State's prison came out on election day to
express his opinion and have it counted.

The next result of that political event was that the ring demanded
new legislation to protect the whisky traffic everywhere. In my
city the women did not crusade the streets, but they said they
would help the men to execute the law. They held meetings, sent
out committees, and had testimony secured against every man who
had violated the law, and when the board of excise held its
meeting those women assembled, three or four hundred, in the
church one morning, and marched in a solid body to the common
council chamber where the board of excise was