THE NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1903
77
Swift (Calif.) on Abolishment of Illiteracy, Its Ultimate Influence. After calling attention to "the mass of ignorant immigrants who almost go from the steerage to the polls"; to the enfranchisement of the half-civilized Indian; to that of paupers, delinquents and defectives, she said:
All this great mass of ignorance goes into the electoral hopper and the marvel is that no worse quality of grist is turned out. It is true that the chief political schemers are by no means illiterate but it is upon illiteracy in the mass that they must depend to carry out their plans. An ignorant voter may be an honest one but unless he is intelligent enough to study public questions for himself he is an easy prey for the political sharper. It is beyond the power of the pen to portray what a magnificent government would be possible with an educated electorate. The idea can be approximated only when we consider how much we have been able to accomplish even with all the inefficiency, vice and ignorance which are permitted to express their will at the polls.
It is because we have a noble ideal for the future of our government that we make our demand for woman suffrage. We point to the official statistics for proof that there are more white women in the United States than colored men and women together; that there are more American-born women than foreign-born men and women combined; that women form only one-eleventh of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries; that they compose more than two-thirds of the church membership, and that the percentage of illiteracy is very much less among women than among men. Therefore we urge that this large proportion of patriotism, temperance, morality, religion and intelligence may be allowed to impress itself upon the government through the medium of the ballot-box.
Mrs. Ida Porter Boyer substituted for her own address on Universal Suffrage a Pretence a paper sent by Rudolph Blankenburg, one of Philadelphia's most distinguished citizens, entitled: Not Sex but Intelligence, in which he said:
That universal suffrage—an arrant misnomer—has fallen short of its well-meant original purpose is beyond dispute. We see its baneful effect in municipal, State and national government. The unparalleled political corruption in most of our large cities, the narrowness of public men in State and nation, whose horizon is bounded by the limits of their home districts or their own sordid purposes, regardless of public interests, find their culmination in the highest legislative body of our land. They crowd seats of mental giants and honored statesmen of former days with golden pigmies or political highwaymen of recent growth and can be directly traced to our defective franchise system. It permits the vote of the intelligent, law-
