Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/377

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NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1912
343

posing as anti-suffragists, with Dr. Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College and of the league, in the chair. A suffrage meeting which touched high water mark was that of Sunday afternoon, when the immense opera house was filled to overflowing and literally thousands stood on the outside in the intense cold and listened to speakers who were hastily sent out to address them. Dr. Shaw presided. The meeting was opened with prayer by the Rt. Rev. Philip Mercer Rhinelander and the music was rendered by the choir, under its director, Samuel J. Riegel, with the audience joining. An eloquent address was given, the Democracy of Sex and Color, by Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, and one by Miss Addams on the Communion of the Ballot, the necessity for cooperative work by men and women, in which she said: "Take a still graver subject. Everywhere vice regulation is coming up for government action. The white slave traffic is international and it goes on from city to city. I ask you, in the name of common sense, is it safe or wise or sane to entrust to men alone the dealing with this age-long evil? Our laws are superior to those of most European countries. In England, because women have been obliged to appeal to the pity of men against these evils, (for the appeal to chivalry seems to have fallen), there is a disposition to divide into two camps, men in one and women in the other. Any sex antagonism thus engendered arises because these grave moral questions have not been taken up by men and women together. By debarring women from suffrage, we are failing to bring to bear on these questions that vast moral energy which dwells in women.... Whenever there. is a great moral awakening it is followed by an extension of the movement for women's rights. The first wave came with the anti-slavery agitation; the second with the prohibition movement and Frances Willard, and now there is coming all over the world this irresistible movement of government to take up great social and industrial questions."

The very fine address of Miss Julia Lathrop, Chief of the National Children's Bureau, on Woman Suffrage and Child Welfare filled over five columns of the Woman's Journal and contained a sufficient argument for the enfranchisement of women if no other ever had been or should be made. "My purpose,"