k on June 6 and the
Populists put a good solid one in their platform on June 12, what then?
Do you suppose all the women in the State would shout for the
Republicans and against the Populists? Would they pack the Republican
meetings, where no word could be spoken for their liberty, and leave the
benches empty in the Populist meetings where at every one hearty appeals
were made to vote for woman's enfranchisement? My dear friends, woman
surely will be able to see that her highest interest, her liberty, her
right to a voice in government, is the great issue of this campaign, and
overtops, outweighs, all material questions which are now pending
between the parties.

I know you think your Kansas men are going to vote on this amendment
independently of party endorsement. You are no more sanguine today than
were the men and women, myself included, in 1867, that those Free State
men, who had given up every comfort which human beings prize for the
sake of liberty, who had fought not only through the border ruffian
warfare but through the four years of the rebellion, would vote freedom
to the heroic women of Kansas. Where would you ever expect to find a
majority more ready to grant to women equal rights than among those old
Free State men? You have not as glorious a generation of men in Kansas
today as you had in 1867. I do not wish to speak disparagingly, but in
the nature of things there can not be another race of men as brave as
those. If you had told me then that a majority of those men would have
gone to the ballot-box and voted against equal rights for women, I
should have defended them with all my power; but they did it, two to
one.

Do you mean to repeat the experiment of 1867? If so, do not put a plank
in your platform; just have a "still hunt." Think of a "still hunt" when
it must be necessarily a work of education! My friends, I know enough of
this State, to feel that it is worth saving. I have given more time and
money and effort to Kansas than to any other State in the Union, because
I wanted it to be the first to make its women free. Women of Kansas,
all is lost if you sit down and supinely listen to politicians and
candidates. Both reckon what they will lose or what they will gain. They
study expediency rather than principle. I appeal to you, men and women,
make the demand imperative: "The amendment must be endorsed by the
parties and advocated on the platform and in the press." Let me propose
a resolution: