You are told that woman in industry needs the ballot. She has had the ballot in Some States for many years, and what is the result? In the United States as a whole, according to Dr. Helen Sumner in her book entitled "Equal Suffrage," women receive 55.3 per cent of the average of men's wages. In Colorado, where women have voted since 1893, women in industry receive only 47 cents for every dollar paid to men in wages. In Massachusetts, where women do not vote, women's wages average 62 cents for every dollar paid men in wages. Clearly, therefore, the ballot has not helped the Colorado wage earner to improve her economic status. You gentlemen know that the ballot has never helped a male voter to get a raise in wages. To enforce and maintain his rights he has had to join a union, and in this way has enforced his demands, but not at the ballot box. Samuel Gompers ought to be a pretty good judge. He is a suffragist, he has had the ballot many years, he has been interested in labor for a long time, and yet he says: "The vote doesn't mean a job, and equal suffrage doesn't necessarily mean equal pay for equal work."

Some of you gentlemen have been led to believe that suffrage helps the cause of prohibition. Let us look at the undisputed facts. Sixteen States have prohibition. Of these, five have woman suffrage. But one of them, Kansas, adopted prohibition in 1880, 32 years before it adopted woman suffrage. So that 12 states have adopted prohibition with men alone voting, while only 4 States have adopted prohibition where women voted. The State of Maine, which has defeated every attempt to introduce woman suffrage, has had prohibition since 1850. North Dakota, which defeated woman suffrage at the polls in 1914, has had prohibition since 1889. Not a single State went "dry" with women voting before November 3, 1914.

According to Senator Works, of California, the city of San Francisco has 3,500 saloons. The male suffrage city of Boston, Mass., with a population one and a half times as large as San Francisco, has only about 700 saloons.

On May 4, 1915, the women of Reno, Nev., exercising the franchise for the first time, voted against the proposition to reduce the number of saloons in that city from 80 to 40 and were publicly thanked by the liquor interests for standing by them. After 46 years of woman suffrage, the State of Wyoming is still "wet.

Colorado, which has had woman suffrage since 1893, adopted prohibition November 3, 1914, but the city of Denver, under the local option provision for cities of 50,000 or over, voted to remain "wet.

California, which has had woman suffrage since 1911, defeated prohibition in 1914 by more than 150,000 majority.

Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway, known as the "Mother of Suffrage in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho," called the Prohibitionists "pirates" in an address before the International Congress of Viticulturists at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, on July 14, 1915, according to the San I rancisco Chronicle of July 15. And she closed her address with an attack on the W. C. T. U. declaring that she had no patience with those who "depend on a pussy wussy piece of white ribbon for protection from themselves."

In Montana, before the election of 1914, the Suffragists refused to permit the W. C. T. U. to march in their parade.

Do not such facts as these show that there is no connection between woman suffrage and prohibition?

The woman suffrage movement is the only movement having for its object the extension of the electorate that has ever met with organized opposition from those it was proposed to enfranchise. This is a fact of tremendous significance. It is a danger signal, gentlemen, that you should not ignore-that must not be ignored by those who wish to do even-handed justice to women and to all concerned in the settlement of this grave problem. Is it reasonable to believe that if woman suffrage were not radically and fundamentally wrong, if it were not a well-organized and well-financed attempt to overturn existing institutions to the detriment of women and the country, thousands of patriotic women all over the land would organize and do the distasteful work they are compelled to do in order to fight it? It is not a question of women's rights. It is a question of which women's rights the fancied rights of those who demand the ballot as the alpha and omega of all things temporal and spiritual, or the real rights of those who wish to remain free from political responsibilities.

After 46 years of organized, aggressive suffrage effort, at least 90 per cent of the female citizens of voting age in the State of Massachusetts are either actively opposed to woman suffrage or so indifferent to or contemptuous of the proposition that to enfranchise them would be a grave menace to the State and to the country. It was the bitter opposition of the suffragists that in 1913 defeated in Massachusetts an attempt which would have given the women of that State a chance to vote "Yes" or "No" on the question of woman suffrage. And in every State where a similar proposition has been

advanced it has met with the tireless and strenuous opposition of the suffrage propagandists who dare not allow the women of any State in the Union to decide the question for themselves.

The fundamental principle of democracy is the consent of the governed. This implies majority rule, and this suffrage movement is the most undemocratic movement that has ever been commenced in the history of civilization, for its próponents will not even permit those who are to receive it, if it is adopted, to pass upon the question of whether they want it, or prefer not to have it. The demand is for "justice for women. Very well. But for which women: For the 10 per cent who demand? Or for the 90 per cent who protest or say nothing? Let us by all means be just to women. But let us be just by respecting the rights of the majority who consent to our government, for in this way we shall be just to the State and to the Nation and to all women, even though they may not know it--to the minority who are in rebellion And then we are told that it is unjust to tax women without giving them representation. The women of the country are not taxed without representation. Every woman tax payer gets for her taxes what every male taxpayer gets-public improvements and protection of life and property. And she is represented by all the male taxpayers in the community, because they can not represent themselves without representing her. Their interests as taxpayers are identical. The fact is, however, that the payment of taxes and the privilege of voting have no connection whatsoever. A man may own property in every city and town in the Commonwealth except the one where he lives, yet he can vote only in the one where he lives. Minors and aliens are fully taxed on their property, but are excluded from the franchise. A system of government based on property would give the rich man a power over the poor man that would destroy democratic government, and give us in its place a plutarchy.

It was because of its inherent injustice that the property qualifications for voters were abolished in the States many years ago, and the demand that it be revived now in the interest of a few women is so extraordinary that it is difficult to understand how any sane person can be deceived by it.

Gentlemen, there is no question of superiority, inferiority, or equality involved in this discussion. Men are not equal to women. Women are not equal to men. They are simply different. And the whole tendency of civilization is toward further differentiation. To say that men and women are equal, or that one sex is superior to the other, is as senseless as to say that air and water are equal, or that one is superior to the other. Each is superior in its own sphere. Both are essential to life. But they are essentially different and can not be compared. To ask woman to assume the burdens of government is to ask her to neglect her natural functions for a wasteful duplication of effort in a field for which nature did not intend her. The duty of men is to protect women from such wasteful and unnatural burdens. The sexes were created different, and designed to cooperate, not to compete. The ballot is not a panacea. It is merely an instrument of convenience in the transaction of the business of government. Reform begins, not in the ballot box or in the halls of legislation, but in the cradle, in the nursery, in the school, in the church, and around the family fireside. And there, woman without the ballot can do more toward making a better world than anything men and women can possibly accomplish through politics. Suffragists would remould life from the top down. Antisuffragists would mould life from the bottom up.

Woman suffrage violates the basic principle of all government-the principle that the electorate must possess the inherent power to execute its sovereign will expressed in legislation. The gift of the ballot would fail to clothe woman with any real political authority, for the obvious reason that there would be nothing back of the ballot. Law is the expression of sovereignty, and sovereignty rests ultimately upon physical force and upon nothing else. The lawless element is kept from lawlessness, not by statutes, but by fear of men clothed with authority to enforce the law. Women are prohibited by nature from being this law-enforcing power. To create an electorate lacking in the one indispensable element of sovereignty would be to undermine the foundations, not only of government, but of the social order. The woman's ballot would be a blankcartridge ballot.

We feel that we scarcely need to call to your attention the fact that every socialist and every feminist is an ardent worker in the cause of votes for women; that the Mormon Church claims-and the claim is historically accurate--to have originated the votes for women idea in this country, and that Mormonism and woman suffrage have spread simultaneously over the radical territory of the West until Mormonism owns Utah, has a majority of the pouplation in Idaho, the balance of power in Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon, and immense influence in Colorado, California, and Washington, every State of which is a woman suffrage State; that only 9 per cent of the people of this country live in double suffrage States; that

woman suffrage has never carried in a single State where a majority of the men were sufficiently alive to its importance to vote upon it; and that in the States which have adopted it only 44 men out of every 100 were recorded on the issue, for and against. In a word, we elieve that the woman-suffrage movement is a delusion-the selfish protest of a discontented few against existing institutions and conventional restraints; that it violates the fundamental principle of democracy in its old attempt to force the will of a small minority upon the great majority of women: that it is socialistic and feministic in its tendency to make the individual and not the family the unit of society: that it is ased on a feeling of sex antagonism and is therefore a menace to the home and to the country; that it is an insult to the men of the United States in its false declaration that they have failed to protect the interests of their wives, sisters, and daughters: that it is unnatural in its dream of a "new sphere" for women, and that it is a distinct injustice to the great mass of women throughout the country, who do not want new urdens thrust upon them. ut wish to e left free for the performance of those duties which are their natural inheritance and which must le performed if the race is not to perish.

The CHAIRMAN. There seem to be no other gentlemen who wish. to say anything in opposition to this Federal amendment at this time. We will therefore proceed to the consideration of other business.

(Whereupon, at 11.30 o'clock p. m., the hearing in the aboveentitled matter was adjourned, and the committee proceeded to the consideration of other business.)