us. But while no word can be spoken in favor, every
campaign orator, as in 1867, is free to speak in opposition.

Men of the Republican party, it comes your time first to choose whom
you will have for your future constituents, to make up the bone and
sinew of your party; whether you will have the most ignorant foreigners,
just landed on our shores, who have not learned a single principle of
free government--or the women of your own households; whether you will
lose to-day a few votes of the high license or the low license
Republicans, foreign or native, black or white, as the case may be, and
gain to yourselves hereafter the votes of the women of the State. These
are the alternatives. It has been stated that you can not have a
suffrage plank in the Republican platform in Saline county because it
would lose the votes of the Scandinavians. Will those 1,000 Scandinavian
men be of more value to the Republicans than will be the votes of their
own wives, mothers, daughters and sisters in all the years to come?

The crucial moment is upon you now, and I say unto you, men of both
parties, you will have driven the last nail in the coffin of this
amendment and banished all hope of carrying it at the ballot-box if you
do not incorporate woman suffrage in your platforms. I know what the
party managers will say, I have talked with and heard from many of them.
I read Mr. Morrill's statement that "this question should go to the
ballot-box on its merits and should not be spoken of in the political
meetings or made a party measure."

The masses are rooted and grounded in the old beliefs in the inferiority
and subjection of women, and consider them born merely to help man carry
out his plans and not to have any of their own. Now, friends, because
this is true, because no man believes in political equality for woman,
except he is educated out of every bigotry, every prejudice and every
usage that he was born into, in the family, in the church and in the
state, so there can be no hope of the rank and file of men voting for
this amendment, until they are taught the principles of justice and
right; and there is no possibility that these men can be reached, can be
educated, through any other instrumentality than that of the campaign
meetings and campaign papers of the political parties. Therefore, when
you say this is not to be a political question, not to be in your
platform, not to be discussed in your meetings, not to be advocated in
yo