ears to hear, will concede for a moment that capital absolutely
dominates the work and wages of the free and enfranchised men of this
republic. It is in order to lift the millions of our wage-earning women
into a position of as much power over their own labor as men possess
that they should be invested with the franchise. This ought to be done
not only for the sake of justice to the women, but to the men with whom
they compete; for, just so long as there is a degraded class of labor in
the market, it always will be used by the capitalists to checkmate and
undermine the superior classes.

Now that as a result of the agitation for equality of chances, and
through the invention of machinery, there has come a great revolution in
the world of economics, so that wherever a man may go to earn an honest
dollar a woman may go also, there is no escape from the conclusion that
she must be clothed with equal power to protect herself. That power is
the ballot, the symbol of freedom and equality, without which no citizen
is sure of keeping even that which he hath, much less of getting that
which he hath not. Women are today the peers of men in education, in the
arts and sciences, in the industries and professions, and there is no
escape from the conclusion that the next step must be to make them the
peers of men in the government--city, State and national--to give them
an equal voice in the framing, interpreting and administering of the
codes and constitutions.

We recognize that the ballot is a two-edged, nay, a many-edged sword,
which may be made to cut in every direction. If wily politicians and
sordid capitalists may wield it for mere party and personal greed; if
oppressed wage-earners may invoke it to wring justice from legislators
and extort material advantages from employers; if the lowest and most
degraded classes of men may use it to open wide the sluice-ways of vice
and crime; if it may be the instrumentality by which the narrow,
selfish, corrupt and corrupting men and measures rule--it is quite as
true that noble-minded statesmen, philanthropists and reformers may make
it the weapon with which to reverse the above order of things, as soon
as they can have added to their now small numbers the immensely larger
ratio of what men so love to call "the better half of the people." When
women vote, they will make a new balance of power that must be weighed
and measured and calculated in its effect upon every social and moral
qu