Foster are worthy of mention. That untiring reformer, the Hon. Neal Dow, has clearly seen and declared in the later years of his labors, that suffrage for women is the short path to the advancement of prohibition.
The Hon. Thomas B. Reed has done us great service in congress as leader of the Republican party in the House, and member of the Judiciary Committee. His report,[1] in 1884, on the submission of the sixteenth amendment has had an extended influence. It is an able argument, and as a keen piece of irony it is worthy the pen of a Dean Swift. In the Senate we have a fast friend in William P. Frye, who has always voted favorably in both houses on all questions regarding the interests of woman. In 1878, in presenting Miss Willard's petition of 30,000 for woman's right to vote on the temperance question, he made an able speech recommending the measure.[2]
And in closing, the name of Maine's venerable statesman, Hannibal Hamlin, so long honored by his State in a succession of official positions from year to year, must not be forgotten. As chairman of the Committee on the District of Columbia in 1870 he presided at the first hearing of the National Woman Suffrage Association, listened with respect and courtesy, and at the close introduced the ladies to each member of the committee, and said "he had been deeply impressed by the arguments, and was almost persuaded to accept the new gospel of woman's equality." Mr. Hamlin's vote has always been favorable and we have no words of his recorded in the opposition.
Hon. James G. Blaine has generally maintained a dignified silence on the question. Thus far in his History, a reviewer says, "he has ignored the existence of woman"; but perhaps in his researches he has not yet reached the garden of Eden, nor taken cognizance of the part the daughters of Eve have played in the rise and fall of mighty nations.
Nevertheless in our prolonged struggle of half a century for equal rights for woman, we have found in every State the traditional ten righteous men necessary to save its people from destruction.
