or what sort of citizens shall we have?

Miss Gertrude Barnum, secretary of the Women's National Trade Union
League, followed with an earnest address on Women as Wage Earners. She
began by saying that although this would be called a representative
audience, wage-earning women were not present. "A speaker should have
been chosen from their ranks," she said. "We have been preaching to
them, teaching them,'rescuing' them, doing almost everything for them
except knowing them and working with them for the good of our common
country. These women of the trade unions, who have already learned to
think and vote in them, would be a great addition, a great strength to
this movement. The working women have much more need of the ballot
than we of the so-called leisure class. We suffer from the insult of
its refusal; we are denied the privilege of performing our obligations
and we have as results things which we smart under. The working women
have not only these insults and privations but they have also the
knowledge that they are being destroyed, literally destroyed, body and
soul, by conditions which they cannot touch by law...." Miss Barnum
discussed "strikes," the "closed shop," conditions under which factory
women work, the domestic problem, the trade unions, and said: "I hope
that this body, which represents women from all over the country, will
take this matter back to their respective States and cities and try to
make the acquaintance of this great half of our population, the
working people. You must bring them to your conferences and
conventions and let them speak on your platform. They will speak much
better for themselves than you can get any one to speak for them...."

An animated discussion took place, many of the delegates asking
sympathetic questions. Mrs. Ella S. Stewart (Ill.) followed with a
delightfully caustic address on Some Fallacies; Our Privileges. The
reporters were so carried away by her "sweetness and beauty" that they
almost forgot to make notes of her speech, of which one of them said:
"She picked up Grover Cleveland, Lyman Abbott and other
anti-suffragists from the time of Samuel Johnson and figuratively spun
them around her finger, to the joy of the audience." In paying her
tribute to chivalry she said: "Of what benefit was the chivalry of the
knights toward their ladies of high degree to the thousands of peasant
women and wives of serfs hitched up with animals and working in the
fields? Of no more va