go out. He said, 'I own the place, and if you don't go out I will put you out.' We continued to sing and were about to pray, when the barkeeper again savagely ordered us to leave. I lost my temper, and said, 'My husband is a lawyer and if you use such language to me as that I will have you arrested.'

"At this, several frequenters of the barroom sprang up and threatened to throw us out. We promptly retired and realized that we had made a mistake.

"That evening we held a meeting and prayed an hour that God would forgive us for our unchristian spirit and conduct.

"The next morning we returned to the saloon with tears in our eyes. I apologized to the man and I and the others pleaded with him. When we had finished, he said in a broken voice, 'You came here yesterday and badgered me like a man, and I treated you like a man, but if you come back in this way, I will stop this business.' And he did."

The recent extraordinary wave of successful antisaloon efforts was largely the work of women and wherever local option prevails the influence of woman is one of the most effective factors, and in some cases it is the principal agent; and that conspicuously in states where women do not vote.

XVIII

VITAL OBJECTIONS TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE (Continued)

RELIGIOUS feuds would affect political life much

more than under present circumstances. It is the

sentiment of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, the leading minds in Protestant communions and the most sagacious statesmen that it is of immense importance to the welfare of this country that the separation of church and state be complete. John Bright in one of his most important speeches on this subject exclaimed: "Of one thing there is no doubt; the influence of priest, parson and minister will be greatly increased if this measure is passed." The kind of influence which he referred to is not the specific work of the "priest, parson or minister," but that which is used to consolidate votes and voters in a compact to use all their political force specifically for the carrying of some measure which will benefit a particular religious body.

The feelings of women upon the subject of religion are so intense that the franchise in a large majority of instances would be exercised under the power of religious prejudice. It is a sign of security that the

most numerous body bearing the Christian name in the United States recognizes the danger to the family and to fidelity to the Church of introducing those who are practically the spiritual teachers of the household into the boiling sea of party politics, and that an immense multitude of Christian women of every denomination are non-sympathetic with a movement so hazardous.

XIX

VITAL OBJECTIONS TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE (Continued)

To

O invest her with the responsibility of voting will diminish the real power of woman in speech.

An unreserved utterance of woman's intuitions, imaginations, moral perceptions, predilections and presentiments is a contribution to the capital of thought possessed by the human race, the value of which cannot be overestimated.

At present hers is actual "free speech"; she may say what she will; men hear and, without subjecting her words to too close a scrutiny, are influenced by her spirit. Require her to vote, to identify herself with a party, in some instances she will become timid; and when at the other extreme she refuses to restrain herself, she may become an impediment to party success and be ignored. When women shall oppose women their party conflicts will deprive them of that power by which they now frequently leaven and control public sentiment.

Rufus Choate delivered an oration in Salem, Mass., in 1848, in which he pronounced a noble eulogium upon the collective womanhood of people like ours:

"I do not suppose I enter on any delicate or debatable region of social philosophy, sure I am that I concede away nothing which I ought to assert for our sex, when I say that the collective womanhood of a people like our own seizes with matchless facility and certainty on the moral and personal peculiarities, and character of marked and conspicuous men, and that we may very wisely address ourselves to her to learn if a competitor for the highest honours has revealed that truly noble nature that entitles him to a place in the hearts of a nation. We talk and think of measures; of creeds in politics; of availability; of strength to carry the vote of Pennsylvania, or the vote of Mississippi. Through all this, her eye seeks the moral, prudential, social, and mental character of the man himself-and she finds it!"

This indeed women can do when the balance of their swift moving mental and emotional scales swings true. Those women were not enfranchised. They had developed those high qualities the great orator eulogizes under the old régime. But should the collective womanhood be constrained to divide its force between political parties, "to think and talk of measures; of creeds in politics; of availability; of strength to carry the vote;" or of how important members of the party could be kept from seceding ; or of how to induce some brilliant orator to renounce his present political affiliations, or to persuade wealthy