and benefit.
Surely American men can trust their sisters as our men have for the
past generation trusted us, to their own as well as our advantage."

In closing the hearing to which the committee gave the strictest
attention, Mrs. Catt said in part:

I have a favor to ask of this committee in an official capacity;
it is something we have never asked before.... We have brought to
you testimonials of the success of woman suffrage in operation
throughout the world and I think that if any man among you were
called to stand before a committee and give in five or ten
minutes some proof of the favorable results of man suffrage, he
would find it a very difficult thing to do. What I now ask in
behalf of our association is that this committee will request the
House of Representatives to appoint a commission to investigate
the results of woman suffrage in operation. This has never been
done....

We ask you in the interest of fairness to see that this
commission is appointed to investigate woman suffrage in exactly
the same spirit it would use if it were investigating man
suffrage in Cuba. We ask you to chase down to its lair every
single charge and objection that has been made and if when an
honest commission has made an honest investigation you discover
that woman suffrage has proved a good thing, if you find that it
has proved as beneficial to women as man suffrage has proved to
men, then we shall expect that another Judiciary Committee will
give a favorable report and ask Congress to submit a 16th
Amendment. And if you discover that it is not a good thing, then
I promise you in behalf of our association that we will turn our
guns into those States and see that it is made a good thing; for
never so long as there are women who are educated, women who
think for themselves, will they rest content until they have the
only weapon that governments can give them for defending liberty
and pursuit of happiness. We stand before you as citizens of the
United States, qualified, intelligent, taxpaying women, who
demand for ourselves the same right to make the Government under
which we live that has been given to men.

No commission was appointed, no report was made by Senate or House
Committee and there were no definite results of such appeals as never
had been made by men for the fr