eir old wages, for their employers cut them
down to even a lower figure.

In the winter following I met the president of this union, a bright
young Irish girl, and asked her, "Do you not think if you had been 500
carpenters or 500 masons, you would have succeeded?" "Certainly," she
said, and then she told me of 200 bricklayers who had the year before
been on strike and gained every point with their employers. "What could
have made the difference? Their 200 were but a fraction of that trade,
while your 500 absolutely controlled yours." Finally she said, "It was
because the editors ridiculed and denounced us." "Did they ridicule and
denounce the bricklayers?" "No." "What did they say about you?" "Why,
that our wages were good enough now, better than those of any other
workingwomen except teachers; and if we weren't satisfied, we had better
go and get married." "What then do you think made this difference?"
After studying over the question awhile she concluded, "It must have
been because our employers bribed the editors." "Couldn't the employers
of the bricklayers have bribed the editors?" She had never thought of
that. Most people never do think; they see one thing totally unlike
another, but the person who stops to inquire into the cause that
produces the one or the other is the exception. So this young Irish girl
was simply not an exception, but followed the general rule of people,
whether men or women; she hadn't thought. In the case of the
bricklayers, no editor, either Democrat or Republican, would have
accepted the proffer of a bribe, because he would have known that if he
denounced or ridiculed those men, not only they but all the trades union
men of the city at the next election would vote solidly against the
nominees advocated by that editor. If those collar laundry women had
been voters, they would have held, in that little city of Troy, the
"balance of political power" and the editor or the politician who
ignored or insulted them would have turned that balance over to the
opposing party.

My friends, the condition of those collar laundry women but represents
the utter helplessness of disfranchisement. The question with you, as
men, is not whether you want your wives and daughters to vote, nor with
you, as women, whether you yourselves want to vote; but whether you will
help to put this power of the ballot into the hands of the 3,000,000
wage-earning women, so that they may be able to compel politicians to
leg