ative born, tax-paying women of this republic.
Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show
me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.
Disfranchisement means inability to make, shape or control one's own
circumstances. The disfranchised must always do the work, accept the
wages, occupy the position the enfranchised assign to them. The
disfranchised are in the position of the pauper. You remember the old
adage, "Beggars must not be choosers;" they must take what they can get
or nothing! That is exactly the position of women in the world of work
today; they can not choose. If they could, do you for a moment believe
they would take the subordinate places and the inferior pay? Nor is it a
"new thing under the sun" for the disfranchised, the inferior classes
weighed down with wrongs, to declare they "do not want to vote." The
rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for
themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.

Years ago in England when the workingmen, starving in the mines and
factories, gathered in mobs and took bread wherever they could get it,
their friends tried to educate them into a knowledge of the causes of
their poverty and degradation. At one of these "monster bread meetings,"
held in Manchester, John Bright said to them, "Workingmen, what you need
to bring to you cheap bread and plenty of it, is the franchise;" but
those ignorant men shouted back to Mr. Bright, precisely as the women of
America do to us today, "It is not the vote we want, it is bread;" and
they broke up the meeting, refusing to allow him, their best friend, to
explain to them the powers of the franchise. The condition of those
workingmen was very little above that of slavery. Some of you may
remember when George Thompson came over to this country and rebuked us
for our crime and our curse of slavery, how the slaveholders and their
abettors shouted back to Mr. Thompson, "Look at home, look into your
mines and your factories, you have slavery in England."

You recollect a book published at that time entitled, "The Glory and
Shame of England." Her glory was the emancipation of slaves in the
British West Indies, and her shame the degraded and outraged condition
of those very miners and factory men. In their desperation, they
organized trades unions, went on strike, fought terrible battles, often
destroying property and sometimes even killing their emp