re. The first time the negro
suffrage question was submitted to the people of Iowa, it
was submitted by a Republican legislature, and the
submission was made when not over one voter in a hundred
desired it done. This latter thing was a plain proposition,
a most justly preferred petition. The people who were
anxious to have the question submitted, are, it is
confidently claimed, in majority. We think their wishes
might well and fitly have been granted. Even those who were
opposed to them must see that the advocates of the reform
will now have a chance to claim that the opponents of it are
afraid to go with them to the people. This is not merely a
defeat for the present year, but practically for four years.
Our State constitution can be amended only after two
legislatures have acted upon the amendment, and the people
have voted upon it. The legislature of two years ago passed
the resolution voted down yesterday. Now, we presume, it
will have to take another start. Four years of waiting and
working before the friends of the reform can be given a
chance to get a verdict from the people, is a long and
painful ordeal. It will not be endured with patience. It
would be asking too much of human nature to expect that.

At the annual convention of 1874, at Des Moines, Bishop Gilbert
Haven of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a clear and liberal
thinker, made a very impressive speech on the power woman could
wield with the ballot in her own hand in making our towns and
cities safe for our sons and daughters to live in. This year, the
Des Moines annual conference of the M. E. Church passed
resolutions advocating woman suffrage as a great moral reform;
while the State convention of the Universalist Association in its
resolution said: "This convention recognizes that women are
entitled to all the social, religious, and political rights which
men enjoy."

At the Diocesan Convention held at Davenport May 1881, the
Episcopal Church took a step forward by striking the word male
out of a canon, thus enabling women to vote for vestrymen, a
right hitherto withheld. It is but a straw in the right
direction, but "straws show which way the wind blows," and we