How unenlightened to withhold from those whose environment has changed, the means of adjusting themselves successfully to new conditions. In the face of this, the paramount injustice of the twentieth century, can any man, born into freedom and nurtured in democracy, hesitate to support that organization which is pledged to supply to women the instrument which will ensure her complete protection? Can any woman plead ignorance, or lack of time, or lack of interest as an excuse for standing aloft from this movement which has already secured for her the opportunity to control her own property, even though married, to collect and spend her own wages and to acquire an education? Should not our loyality to those noble women who have bequeathed to us, as a birthright, what was theirs only after indefatigable effort, compel us to take upon our shoulders some of the burden of the final endeavor which is destined to gain for women that which will add one hundred fold to the value of all these other rights, namely the ballot?
It is the heavy drag of the indifferent woman, uninformed in the history of her sex, unemancipated from habits of thought, fostered by centuries of isolated toil and her present superficial education that delays our final triumph. It is the unreasonable demand, never suggested when men have been applicants for the franchise, that a majority of us must ask for the ballot before it is expedient to grant it, that is also holding back the laurel of victory. Well do these obstructionists know that never, in the history of the world, have so large a number of disfranchised citizens knocked so persistently at the door of government; never has the demand for the ballot been so logically and peacefully presented; never has a ruling class been so obdurate in its refusal. Almost two generations have passed since the inception of this movement at the Seneca
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