e held it solid in power from the ratification of the
Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, to the present day. Until the Democrats
convince them that they will do more and better for them than the
Republicans are doing, there will be no appreciable division of the
negro vote.

The vast numbers of wage-earning men coming from Europe to this country,
where manhood suffrage prevails with no limitations, find themselves
invested at once with immense political power. They organize their
trades unions, but not being able to use the franchise intelligently,
they continue to strike and to fight their battles with the capitalists
just as they did in the old countries. Neither press nor politicians
dare to condemn these strikes or to demand their suppression because the
workingmen hold the balance of power and can use it for the success or
defeat of either party.

[Miss Anthony here related various timely instances of strikes
where force was used to prevent non-union men from taking the
places of the strikers, and neither the newspapers nor political
leaders ventured to sustain the officials in the necessary steps to
preserve law and order, or if they did they were defeated at the
next election.]

It is said women do not need the ballot for their protection because
they are supported by men. Statistics show that there are 3,000,000
women in this nation supporting themselves. In the crowded cities of the
East they are compelled to work in shops, stores and factories for the
merest pittance. In New York alone, there are over 50,000 of these women
receiving less than fifty cents a day. Women wage-earners in different
occupations have organized themselves into trades unions, from time to
time, and made their strikes to get justice at the hands of their
employers just as men have done, but I have yet to learn of a successful
strike of any body of women. The best organized one I ever knew was that
of the collar laundry women of the city of Troy, N. Y., the great
emporium for the manufacture of shirts, collars and cuffs. They formed a
trades union of several hundred members and demanded an increase of
wages. It was refused. So one May morning in 1867, each woman threw down
her scissors and her needle, her starch-pan and flat-iron, and for three
long months not one returned to the factories. At the end of that time
they were literally starved out, and the majority of them were compelled
to go back, but not at th