WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE.

White Ribbon, Volume 22, Issue 261, 19 March 1917, Page 7

WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE.

President Wilson: “What does this #reat force mean? If you ask anybody that knows, he would say that it has not only come to stay, but it has come with a conquering power. I sometimes get a little impatient by a discussion of the channels and methods by which suffrage is to prevail. It is going to prevail. lhat is the vital fact. Its growth has gone on not because women are discontented. It is because women have seen the vision of duty. And that is something which we not only can’t resist, but if we be true Americans, we do not wish to resist. What we have to realise in dealing with a force of this sort is that we are dealing with a question of life itself. What I felt as 1 sat here to-night was the wholesome contagion of the cause. 1 have come to suggest, among other things, that when a force of this kind is steadily working, and the tide is rising beneath a full moon, you need not be afraid it will not come to its flood. I feel the tide, and I rejoice in it, and I shall not quarrel in the end as to the method of it. I have not come to ask you to be patient, because you have been. I have come to congratulate you because there is a force behind you which will prevail, and you still have time to wait a little while.” Mrs Carrie Chapman Catt: “Organise in every assembly, district, and every voting precinct. It is the only way to make our appeal invincible. Swell the army, then set it upon the trail of every legislator and Congressman, for they alone hold the key of our political emancipation. Compel this army of lawmakers to see woman suffrage, to think woman suffrage, to talk woman suffrage every minute of the day, until they heed our plea. All this is meie preparedness. The great war will bring untold changes in its wake; it presages a total change in the status of women. In Europe, from the Polar Circle to the Aegean Sea, women have risen and taken the places made vacant by men, and in so doing they have grown in self-respect and in the esteem of their respective nations. What will happen after the war? Will the widows left with families to support cheerfully leave the well-paid posts for those commanding lower wages? Not u ithout protest! The economic axiom, denied and evaded for cen-

turies, will be emblazoned on every factory, counting-house, and shop: ‘Equal pay for equal work,’ and common justice will slowly but surely enforce that law. The European woman has risen. She may not rc- « 1 '.sc it yci, but the woman ‘door-mat’ in every land has unconsciously become a ‘door-jamb.’ She will become accustomed to her new dignity by the time the men come home. She will wonder how she ever could have been content lying across the threshold now that she discovers the upright jamb gives so much broader and more normal a vision of things.’’ Premier Asquith (August 14, 1916): “The moment you begin a general enfranchisement on lines of state service you are brought face to face with another most formidable proposition. What are you to do with the women? I do not think I shall be suspected—my record in the matter is clear —of having any special desire or predisposition to bring women within the pale of the franchise, but I have received a great many representations from those who are authorised to speak for them, and I am bound to say that they presented to me not only a reasonable, but I think, from their point of view, ar. unanswerable ease. They say they are perfecTy (ontent if we do not change the qualification of the franchise to abide by the existing state of things, but that if you are going to bring in a new class of electors, on whatever ground of State service, they must point out—and none of us can possibly deny their claim—that during this war the women of this country have rendered as effective service in the prosecution of the war as any other class of the community. It is true they cannot fight in the gross material sense of going out with rifles and so forth, but in armament factories they are doing the work which the men who are fighting had to perform before; they have taken the places of these men; they are the servants of the State; and they are aiding in the most effective way in the prosecution of the war. What is more, and this is a point which makes a special appeal to me, they say when the war comes to an end, and when these abnormal and, of course, to a large extent transient conditions have to be revised, and when the process of industrial reconstruction has to be set on foe. iave not the women a special claim to be

heard on the many questions which will arise directly affecting their interests, and possibly meaning for them large displacements of labour? I say to the House quite candidly, as a life-long opponent of Woman Suffrage, I cannot deny that claim.”