entirely different but equally effective note was struck by Mrs.
Ellis Meredith, a prominent journalist of Denver, who said during her
address on Colorado Women and Legislation:

If I regarded the ballot merely as a right or a privilege or an
end; a divine, far-off event toward which the whole creation
moves and which, once attained, obviates its ever having to move
afterward, I should say it does not make a bit of difference what
we have done with it. If it is a right, who can question it? If
it is a privilege, it is beyond question. If it is an end, it is
achieved. But I do not regard it as any of these. To my mind the
ballot is simply one of our many modern labor-saving inventions.
It is the easiest way.... In the ten years that women have been
voting in Colorado, I believe they have done at least five times
as much as all the rest of the non-voting women in the United
States together, and I base this modest claim upon the record of
our statute books as compared with those of other States. Women
stand relatively for the same thing everywhere and their first
care is naturally and inevitably for the child. Whatever we have
done, other women wish to do. In many States they have tried and
failed. The difference is they are using stone-age methods while
we have those of the 20th century."

No one who knows anything about our laws will attempt to deny
that women have revolutionized the attitude of our State toward
the child. Two-thirds of their work has been for the children....
These laws mean that in Colorado there are no children under 14
out of school; we have no child beggars nor street musicians and
no girls vending anything. We have the best child labor law in
the world. We have the strictest laws for the prevention of the
abuse, moral, mental or physical of children, of any country, and
the best enforced, not merely in our cities but throughout the
entire State. We have the strongest compulsory school law and the
most enlightened law concerning delinquent children of any, save
where our laws have been copied.... What we have done has not
been for ourselves but for the very least of these. It has been
not for our fading today but for the dawning tomorrow. We have
gone to our legislators with new ideas and have set a little
child in the midst of the