"Go on," the old lady commanded as the Judge paused.
He did go on. He called attention to certain laws governing county elections.
"With all your knowledge of the needs of women, and your bitter sense of injustice, you women never thought of this simple means by which you may win. And it was the thing Sarah Mosely grasped. She was the first woman in America, so far as I know, to grasp the significance of this easy and effective method of obtaining suffrage for women. And instead of leaving her money to a hospital, or to endow a chair or two in some university, she has left it for this purpose. It's amazing—her vision, and the directness with which she reasoned to the right conclusion!"
"Still I don't see how we can force this issue here," Mrs. Walton insisted.
"Do you know, Susan, why men have the ballot and why women have not got it?"
"I have my suspicions, John. It's because they've got everything else, including us. Because they've got pockets in their breeches, for one thing."
"Exactly! now you've got pockets in your skirts, with something like twenty thousand dollars to spend for a certain purpose. And that is not all you have. This Board of Trust owns the majority of stock in the National Bank, and has loaned money to nearly all the business houses in town. You hold mortgages on nineteen thousand acres of land in this county. You practically own the Signal. There is not a politician anywhere who would not know he held this county in the hollow of his hand if he had that much influence to back him. Influence, Susan, is not mere influence ever. It's power! You've got that!"
"When did you become such an ardent suffragist, John?" Susan suddenly demanded.
The Judge laughed.
"I've been a kind of mugwump of the cause for years. If I were younger, I doubt if I should be ardently in favour of it now. I admit that I prefer the dear woman to the abler ballot-bearing woman—every man must—but before your sex can become entirely like my sex except in gender, Susan, I shall be where Sarah Mosely is now. It will not matter to me. I admit, however, that I was converted to active partisanship by Mrs. Mosely. I have been more impressed by that dim little old woman than by all the arguments you, for example, ever made for suffrage. She was herself an unanswerable plea for the rights of women to live, for she had never really lived at all. She looked as if every mortgage held by her estate had been foreclosed at her expense."