The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

The President had asked to speak last and he listened with much interest to a program of noted public workers as follows: Why Women Need the Vote. The Call of the Working Woman for the Protection of the Woman's Vote—Mrs. Raymond Robins, president of National Women's Trades Union League. Mothers in Politics—Miss Julia Lathrop, chief of National Children's Bureau. A Necessary Safeguard to Public Morals—Dr. Katharine Bement Davis, Chief of Parole Commission, New York City. Working Children—Dr. Owen R. Lovejoy, general secretary of National Child Labor Committee. Each speaker emphasized the necessity for the enfranchisement of women as a means for the nation's highest welfare. Mrs. Catt was in the chair and introduced the President, who said with much earnestness and sincerity:

Madam President, Ladies of the Association: I have found it a real privilege to be here tonight and to listen to the addresses which you have heard. Though you may not all of you believe it, I would a great deal rather hear somebody else speak than speak myself, but I would feel that I was omitting a duty if I did not address you tonight and say some of the things that have been in my thoughts as I realized the approach of this evening and the duty that would fall upon me.

The astonishing thing about the movement which you represent is not that it has grown so slowly but that it has grown so rapidly. No doubt for those who have been a long time in the struggle, like your honored president, it seems a long and arduous path that has been trodden, but when you think of the cumulating force of the movement in recent decades you must agree with me that it is one of the most astonishing tides in modern history. Two generations ago—no doubt Madam President will agree with me in saying this—it was a handful of women who were fighting for this cause; now it is a great multitude of women who are fighting for it. There are some interesting historical connections which I should like to attempt to point out to you.

One of the most striking facts about the history of the United States is that at the outset it was a lawyers' history. Almost all of the questions to which America addressed itself, say a hundred years ago, were legal questions; were questions of methods, not questions of what you were going to do with your government but questions of how you were going to constitute your government; how you were going to balance the powers of the State and the Federal government; how you were going to balance the claims of property against the processes of liberty; how you were going to make up your government so as to balance the parts against each other, so that the Legislature would check the Executive and the Executive the Legislature. The idea of government when the United States became a nation was a mechanical conception and the mechanical conception which underlay it was the Newtonian theory of the universe. If you take up the Federalist you see that some parts of it read like a treatise on government. They speak of the centrifugal and centripetal forces and locate the President somewhere in a rotating system. The whole thing is a calculation of power and adjustment of parts. There was a time when nobody but a lawyer could know enough to run the government of the United States....

And then something happened. A great question arose in this country which, though complicated with legal elements, was at bottom a human question and nothing but a question of humanity. That was the slavery question, and is it not significant that it was then, and then for the first time, that women became prominent in politics in America? Not many women—those prominent in that day are so few that you can almost name them over in a brief catalogue—but, nevertheless, they then began to play a part not only in writing but in public speech, which was a very novel part for women to play in America; and after the Civil War had settled some of what seemed to be the most difficult legal questions of our system the life of the nation began not only to unfold but to accumulate.

Life in the United States was a comparatively simple matter at the time of the Civil War. There was none of that underground struggle which is now so manifest to those who look only a little way beneath the surface. Stories such as Dr. Davis has told tonight were uncommon in those simpler days. The pressure of low wages, the agony of obscure and unremunerated toil did not exist in America in anything like the same proportions as they exist now. And as our life has unfolded and accumulated, as the contacts of it have become hot, as the populations have assembled in the cities and the cool spaces of the country have been supplemented by feverish urban areas, the whole nature of our political questions has been altered. They have ceased to be legal questions. They have more and more become social questions, questions with regard to the relations of human beings to one another, not merely their legal relations but their moral and spiritual relations to one another.

This has been most characteristic of American life in the last few decades, and as these questions have assumed greater and greater prominence the movement which this association represents has gathered cumulative force, so that when anybody asks himself, What does this gathering force mean? if he knows anything about the history of the country he knows that it means something which has not only come to stay but has come with conquering power.

I get a little impatient sometimes about the discussion of the channels and methods by which it is to prevail. It is going to prevail and that is a very superficial and ignorant view of it which attributes it to mere social unrest. It is not merely because women are discontented, it is because they have seen visions of duty, and that is something that we not only can not resist but if we be true Americans we do not wish to resist. Because America took its origin in visions of the human spirit, in aspirations for the deepest sort of liberty of the mind and heart, and, as visions of that sort come to the sight of those who are spiritually minded America comes more and more into its birthright and into the perfection of its development; so that what we have to realize is that in dealing with forces of this sort we are dealing with the substance of life itself.

I have felt as I sat here tonight the wholesome contagion of the occasion. Almost every other time that I ever visited Atlantic City I came to fight somebody. I hardly know how to conduct myself when I have not come to fight anybody but with somebody.

I have come to suggest among other things that when the forces of nature are working steadily and the tide is rising to meet the moon, you need not be afraid that it will not come to its flood. We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of it, and we shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it, because, when you are working with masses of men and organized bodies of opinion, you have got to carry the organized body along. The whole art and practice of government consist not in moving individuals but in moving masses. It is all very well to run ahead and beckon, but, after all, you have got to wait for them to follow. I have not come to ask you to be patient, because you have been, but I have come to congratulate you that there has been a force behind you that will beyond any peradventure be triumphant and for which you can afford a little while to wait.