Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/617

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NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1918-1919
591
and pay taxes on $300 worth of property. In Mississippi the percentage is 56.2 but there also they impose an educational qualification. In the eight years since these figures were estimated by the Government this percentage has greatly decreased, so that South Carolina claims that there is now no preponderance of negroes. In the other four States also in the so-called "black belt" an educational test is imposed upon the voters. In addition to all this we must consider that during the last decade the negro population has increased 11 per cent and the white population 22 per cent. Furthermore, in the past year alone 75,000 negroes have gone from one southern State to the north, and 73,000 have gone from three other southern States to one northern State alone. So it appears that we must transfer part of our rather hysterical anxieties with regard to the southern negro vote to some other States.

Mrs. Allen spoke from the standpoint of one who had lived many years in a State where women voted and asked the question: "Can you gentlemen not think what it means to women to know that their men are so chivalrous and have such a belief in their integrity and their intelligence that they are willing to make them their equal partners politically? Can you not see that under such conditions men and women are firmer friends; that husbands and wives are closer together and that all of the family relations are better because the adults of all the families are equally interested in city, State and national affairs?' She told how on the battlefield and in the hospitals in France could be heard in all languages the one cry, "mother," and she ended with the plea: "Our world is weary and wounded and sick and if you will listen in the silence of the night you will hear the same cry; the world is calling for the mother voice in its councils and in its activities."

The afternoon was devoted to the address of Mrs. Catt, which, with the questions of the committee and her answers, filled twenty-five pages of the printed report. For four decades the distinguished presidents of the National Suffrage Association had made their arguments and pleadings before committees of Congress—Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Miss Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, and then Mrs. Catt for eight years. This was the last time it would ever be necessary and the first time before a House committee which intended to report in favor. The changed character of her speaking was shown in her opening sentence: "The time of argument on woman suffrage has gone The controversy has been waged over a greater part of the