impetus to civic well-being can be looked for when they are set free to use their powers as full-fledged citizens.

It

Now, just a word as to one of the reasons why women need the vote, which lies particularly near my heart and which ought to appeal to supporters of the Democratic administration at Washington, as it comes straight out of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom." will be remembered that it is the thesis of this illuminating book that the fundamental trouble with our Government to-day is the too wide separation between the public and private interests of the people. Where once life was so simple and the functions of government so few and so immediate that they could come within the experience of every individual. life now has become a crowded, importunate affair, while the functions of government are so numerous and at the same time so remote that few are aware of their existence. Thus public interests drop wholly out of the thought of the masses of our people. And we shall not win freedom again, says President Wilson, until new channels of vital communication are opened between government and the daily lives of the people.

Now, is not one way to bind public and private interest together, to give the vote to the half of the race whose homemaking interest is affected directly and at innumerable points by governmental action? Home making, it can not be too often insisted, is no longer a purely private undertaking. Its impulse is private now as much as in the olden days when a woman's whole sphere of possible influence and activity was really bounded by the home. In modern times, however, it is by collective action that many home functions must be discharged. Schools and playgrounds, street cleaning, and garbage collection, pure-food laws, and board of health regulationsthese are but a few of the activities whereby the home is ministered to by the municipality, the State, and the Nation. Women as voters may be trusted to find this out and to use this new tool for promoting the well-being of husband and children. As citizens, they will be dealing with matters that make up the warp and woof of their private life.

This intimate relation between the public and the private applies especially to the industrial classes whose civic consciousness it is so important to awaken. The propertied class can buy immunity from the worst penalties of bad government. For working people there is no escape. Their children must attend the public school; they must play in the streets unless public playgrounds are provided; they must drink common water and common milk; they are exposed to all the diseases which the board of health fails to control. And it is not fantastic to expect the average home-loving women may grow to understand this when political responsibility is laid upon them.

The claim that women as voters will quicken the general interest in matters political need not rely upon prophecy. We can appeal here to experience, just as in the claim that women use the ballot when they have it. For instance in New Zealand, before women voted, it is said to have been rare for more than 60 per cent of the men on the electoral roll to vote. But the very first year the women voted the proportion of men casting the ballot rose to 69.6, and a few years later it rose to 79 per cent. Similar results are noted in many of the equal-suffrage States of the country. Now, is not this

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increased male vote a natural reaction from the quickened political interest of mothers and sweethearts and wives and sisters and daughters-in other words, from the quickened interest of the family group in matters of government?

As illustrating this point, let me cite an incident that occurred in the city of Alameda shortly after women were given the right to vote. An election was pending on a proposed bond issue by the city for the purpose of improving the municipal electric-light plant, the alternative being the abandonment of the plant and the supply of the city by a private corporation. Ordinarily, as is well known, a very small per cent of the voters take the trouble to record their wishes on such a matter, men being far too much absorbed in earning the wherewithal to buy bonds for the family maintenance. But the chief anxiety of the women of Alameda, as in other places, was the increased cost of living; and the question of a possible issue of municipal bonds connected itself quickly with the family budget. Would it make electric light cheaper or dearer? That was the current talk of the city. But the question was one on which they found it difficult to get light; the men knew no more upon that matter than they did. So the women did the thing that women do nowadays very generally-they arranged for a series of public meetings in the civic headquarters which they maintained, at which experts should explain the merits of various systems of electric-light supply. These meetings were crowded, my informer told me, night after night; and, what is more, they were crowded not only by women, but by men whose interest had been aroused upon a matter that had become one of family discussion. And when the vote was counted it was found, if I remember the figures aright, that something like 90 per cent of the adult population had cast their ballot.

Such a quickened interest in public affairs as is bound to result from the quickened interest of the family group, an interest which dictates the topics of conversation at mealtimes, and which thus inoculates the minds of the children with the sense that their very private lives are affected by public concerns, can not fail to work out in good citizenship, in human uplift. Can the Democratic Party afford to shut itself away from this source of renewed power, from this wellspring of public interest, of civic enthusiasm? We have President Wilson's profound diagnosis that where the political consciousness of the people slackens there the efficiency and the justice and the purity of government will surely decay. It is because I have the success of the present administration very ardently at heart that I hope the majority in the House will see its way to reconsider what, after all, was a somewhat unconsidered action in caucus.

STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY MRS. HELEN H. GARDENER.

Mrs. GARDENER. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the Judiciary Committee, in a published statement yesterday the Secretary of State, over his own signature, used these simple, direct, easily understood words:

All believers in a republic accept the doctrine that the government must derive its just powers from the consent of the governed, and the President gives every legitimate encouragement to those who represent this idea of government, while he discourages those who attempt to overthrow or ignore the principle of popular government.

I am sure that all of us who know the Secretary of State-and I have known him personally and watched his career ever since he came here a young Congressman-I am sure that all of us hope and want to believe that this latest pronouncement of his, given out officially as from the leading Cabinet officer, was intended to be accepted at home as well as abroad as literally and absolutely true, and not as a mere bit of spectacular oratory.

But if it is true, then not one of you gentlemen who has it in his heart to oppose woman suffrage is a believer in our form of government. Not one of you is loyal to the flag. Not one of you is a true American.

For, gentlemen, you do not allow us women to give our consent, yet we are governed.

You are not sitting in Congress justly, and Mr. Bryan and the President do not believe that you are- -none of you except those who are from woman-suffrage States-or else those official statements, made only yesterday, are mere oratory for foreign consumption.

He says that the President discourages those who attempt to overthrow or even to "ignore" this principle of popular government. We are more than glad to believe that Mr. Bryan is correct in this plain statement, for then we will know that a number of you gentlemen have received and will receive a good deal of "discouragement at the hands of the President, and that those of you who stand with us and vote for us will receive your sure reward from him, in that every legitimate encouragement" will be yours, and also, incidentally, ours.

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We need it. We think it is overdue.

Up to the present time we have not felt that either the President or the Secretary of State quite fully realized that there is a good deal of belated encouragement due us and quite a limitless supply of discouragement due those who try "to overthrow or ignore" all semblance of a belief in the right of women to give their consent to their own government.

I am glad to have so high an authority that the good time is not only coming, but that it has at last arrived-and from the Democratic Party.

Again, in this simple, plain, seemingly frank statement of the Secretary of State, he says:

He [the President] is not concerned as to the personnel of the Government. All he desires is that the people shall have such officers as they desire.

per

Could anything be plainer, more explicit, than that? The " sonnel" of our officers at present is purely masculine, and we women do not have a chance to say what officers we desire" even among those.

It is true that Mr. Bryan was writing about our "foreign" policy, but to cover that case, to connect his statement up with our case, I have only to quote another line of the same article, which says:

Nothing will be encouraged away from home that is forbidden here.

Yet, away from home, he says that the fixed foreign policy is that "the people shall have such officers as they desire," and that these officers must have "the consent of the governed."

That is precisely what we women demand. Are the Mexican peons more to our Government than are the women of America?

If the Mexican officials must be disciplined, unless they are ready to admit that "the consent of the governed must be obtained" before there can be a legitimate government which we can recognize, how is it possible for you and for the President and the State Department to absolutely ignore or refuse the same ethical and political principle here at home for one-half of all the people, who form what you call and hold up to the world as a republic?

No one who lives, no one who ever lived, no one who ever will live understands or really accepts and believes in a republic which denies to women the right of consent by their ballots to that government and to have and exercise an equal voice in its development.

Such a position is unthinkable, and the time has come when an aristocracy of sex must give place to a real republic or the absurdity of the position as it exists will make us the laughingstock of the world.

Let us either stop our pretense before the nations of the earth of being a republic and of "quality before the law" or else let us become the Republic that we pretend to be. Which shall we do?

AFTER RECESS.

The committee reassembled, pursuant to the taking of recess, at 2 o'clock

p. m.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order and Mrs. Dodge will be recognized at this time.

STATEMENT OF MRS. A. M. DODGE, OF NEW YORK, N. Y., PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OPPOSED TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

Mrs. DODGE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee,*I came in very late this morning, but I was here in time to hear the last threats that were hurled at you gentlemen, which had, apparently, been a good deal the order of the morning, judging from what one of the members said.

It seems to me rather curious that the women who are making the various kinds of threats against the Members of Congress have been for the last few months unable to agree among themselves. They seem to be split up into several factions. It does not seem to us that the threats can be very grave to you men, although they have been made very often, because it seems to us as though these women were going to be split up among themselves eventually that is, the suffragists will not know whom to threaten before they get through. Probably they will threaten both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and, then, it may even be possible that the Progressives will

have a chance.

We begin to hear from all over the country, the South as well as the great Middle West, a very decided demand for help. The women of the country are beginning to be frightened. They are frightened at exactly the same sort of thing by which the suffragists try to frighten you mnen-noise-so that in many States women are beginning to organize for the first time against suffrage.

We are here to-day rather against our wishes. We did not want to bother you men again, because the matter has been pretty well

settled for this session of Congress, at least. But the suffragists had demanded a hearing of you gentlemen, and so we asked you to hear us, and you have very courteously extended to us that privilege. We are here to represent the majority of women still quiet, but not going to be quiet very much longer.

We desire to say we are here with no threats, but we hope to present a few arguments, and, as you say, the arguments are much more attractive than the threats.

There is no need to be much alarmed by that threat of 4,000,000 women voters who will be lined up against the Democratic Party, of which you heard several times this morning. These are a few facts regarding that much quoted 4,000,000.

The United States Census Bureau states that in Illinois and the nine full-suffrage States there is a total of exactly 3,565,564 women 21 years old and over, and this number includes the ignorant, the foreign-born, the unnaturalized, the negro, the Indian, the Chinese, and Japanese. Under the limitations and restrictions put on the franchise in these States, it would be more than liberal to estimate that the number which could be represented by suffrage leaders is 2,500,000. But the authorities of the States where woman suffrage obtains estimate that, at a top figure, not more than two-thirds of the possible women voters register, and not more than 50 per cent of those who register go to the polls. Two-thirds of 2,500,000 does not amount to a total of 1,700,000. That is nearer the number of voters whom the suffragists might control.

But, gentlemen, there are two points to be considered in regard to these voters. Do the suffragists really think that they can influence all the women voters who have allied themselves with the Democratic Party to vote against that party with either the Republican or Progressives because the Democrats have not given them what they want in Congress? And then they ignore the fact that in the newest enfranchised States, at least, in California and in Washington in particular, an enormous number of women did not want the franchise. If, as good antisuffragists, considering voting a duty, they register and go to the polls, can they be controlled by suffrage leaders because the Democratic Party refuses to force a burden on the women of other States which they themselves did not wish or ask for? Of the many extraordinary statements which the suffragists have made during the past year, in their desperate effort to induce Congress by a Federal enactment to dictate to the States the consideration of woman suffrage, this is the most extreme. I wish to say that these suffragists who make these threats are not representing the women of the country. It is the women of the country whom we try to represent, and we have tried for several years against the noisy, insistent, and persistent demands of a group.

The first speaker whom I desire to present to you is Mrs. Henry White, who is a member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts State Association Opposed to Women Suffrage.

STATEMENT OF MRS. HENRY WHITE, OF BOSTON, MASS., A MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE ASSOCIATION OPPOSED TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

Mrs. WHITE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, we of the Massachusetts association opposed to the further extension of