has continued the same, as it undoubtedly has, during the past three years, there are in college at the present time 38,268 women students. Although there are in the United States nearly 1,800,000 less women than men, women already constitute considerably over one-third of the entire student body and are steadily gaining on men. This means that in another generation or two one-half of all the people who have been to college in the United States will be women; and, just as surely as the seasons of the year succeed one another or the law of gravitation works, just so surely will this great body of educated women wish to use their trained intelligence in making the towns, cities and States of their country better places for themselves and their children to live in; just so surely will the men with whom they have worked side by side in college classes claim and receive their aid in political as well as home life. The logic of events does not lie. It is unthinkable that women who have learned to act for themselves in college and have become awakened there to civic duties should not care for the ballot to enforce their wishes.
The same is true of every woman's club and every individual woman who tries to obtain laws to save little children from working cruel hours in cotton mills or to open summer gardens for homeless little waifs on the streets of a great city. These women, too, are being irresistibly driven to desire equal suffrage for the sake of the wrongs they try to right. . . . It seems to me in the highest degree ungenerous for women like these in this audience, who are cared for and protected in every way, not to desire equal suffrage for the sake of other less fortunate women, and it is not only ungenerous but short-sighted of such women not to desire it for their own sakes. There is nothing dearer to women than the respect and reverence of their children and of the men they love. Yet every son who has grown up reverencing his mother's opinion must realize, when he reaches the age of twenty-one, with a shock from which he can never wholly recover, that in the most important civic and national affairs her opinion is not considered equal to his own....
I confidently believe that equal suffrage is coming far more swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women will soon refuse to be subjected to such humiliating conditions. Educated men will recoil in their turn from the sheer unreason of the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and mothers are to be consulted upon every other question except the laws and government under which they and their husbands and children must live and die. Equal suffrage thus seems to me to be an inevitable and logical consequence of the higher education of women. And the higher education of women is, if possible, a still more inevitable result of the agitation of the early woman suffragists....
We who are guiding this educational movement today owe the profoundest debt of gratitude to those early pioneers—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and, above and beyond all, to Susan B. Anthony. Other women reformers, like other men reformers, have given part of their time and energy. She has given