LOWERING THE MORAL TONE.

The Remonstrance quotes a Mr. J. Grattan Gray, resident somewhere in the immense area of "Australasia "-not necessarily in New Zealand as saying: "Public and political life and the personnel of parliament have degenerated to a most deplorable degree ever since the introduction of female franchise" in New Zealand.

Hon. Hugh H. Lusk says of the effect of equal suffrage:

We see it in the changed character of the men who are elected. Character is more regarded than cleverness. It is asked about every candidate, "Has he a good record? Is he above suspicion, an honorable man, a useful citizen, pure of any suspicion of complicity with corrupt politics?" That is the man who, under the combined suffrage of men and women, gets the largest number of votes and is elected.

At the Church Congress in Nottingham, England, the Most Rev. William Gordon Cowie, D. D., Bishop of Auckland and Primate of New Zealand, read a paper on the Colonial Clergy, in which he said:

Our young New Zealand clergy would also be able to show, from personal experience, how the conferring of the parliamentary franchise on all our women of the age of 21 years has led to no harm or inconvenience, but that the men of New Zealand were wondering why the women of the colony had remained so long without the right to vote at parliamentary elections.

WOMEN AND OFFICE.

The Remonstrance pays a merited tribute to the late president of the Massachusetts Antisuffrage Association, Mrs. J. Elliot Cabot. Mrs. Cabot's personality and life furnished a stronger argument for the fitness of women to vote than any words of hers could furnish against it. In the early days, when the suffragists were trying to obtain for women the opportunity to serve on public boards, a bigoted opponent remarked: "When a man comes home tired at night, he does not want to kiss an overseer of the poor or a member of the school board." Mrs. Cabot served for many years in Brookline as an overseer of the poor, and for ten years as a member of the school. board. She was not beloved the less by her family and friends on that account, or less esteemed by the community in which she lived. For her opportunities to render these public services, she was indebted chiefly to the suffragists.

The late venerable Samuel E. Sewall (who was an officer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association) did more than any other man to secure improved laws for women in that State. For thirty years it was he who drew the bills, helped the women to plead their cause before legislative committees, and obtained a long succession of legal changes. In the Woman's Journal of October 27, 1877, Judge Sewall reviewed the progress that had been made in legislation for women up to that time, and said:

How has this work been accomplished? By the steady growth of public opinion, promoted and aided in a very great degree, if not entirely created, by the labors of the suffragists. I may add that, when the suffragists first began to move, the prejudice against altering the status of wives, and giving women the public offices into which they have since been introduced, was stronger than that which now resists giving them the ballot.

A pamphlet issued by the "anti" association objects to equal suffrage on the ground that it "involves the holding of office." Is not this rather inconsistent, in view of the fact that its president and several of its leading members have been holders of public offices?

THE TEST OF EXPERIMENT.

Women have now for years been voting, literally by hundreds of thousands, in many different parts of the English-speaking worldin England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia; in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Kansas. In all these places put together, the opponents have not yet found a dozen respectable men who assert over their own names and addresses that equal suffrage has had any bad results whatever. This scarcity of adverse testimony is the more remarkable in view of the fact that active antisuffrage associations in New York and Massachusetts have been at work for years diligently gathering all the evidence against it they could find. Meanwhile testimony to its good results has been given by the chief justices and all the judges of the supreme court in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Idaho; by a long list of governors, college presidents, clergymen and representative men and women, and in two of the enfranchised States, by a practically unanimous vote of the State legislature.

STATE ASSOCIATIONS.

The Remonstrance claims that there are antisuffrage associations in our States, and committees in four more. There are suffrage associtions in almost every State and Territory of the Union.

Mr. Amos R. Wells, editor of the Christian Endeavor World, the organ of the Christian Endeavor societies, lately addressed letters of inquiry to twenty-five ministers of several different denominations, choosing their names at random among his subscribers in the enfranchised States. He asked, "Is equal suffrage working well, fairly well, or badly?" One of the twenty-five answered that it was working badly and three that it was working fairly well, while the twenty-one others were positive and emphatic in saying that it worked well.

Miss ANTHONY. Now, I wish to present to you Norway, in the person of Mrs. Gudrun Drewsen.

STATEMENT OF MRS. GUDRUN DREWSEN.

Mrs. DREWSEN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, Norwegian women look back to the 25th of May as a day of great victory; for on the 25th of May last a bill was passed in our Parliament which granted municipal suffrage to all women paying taxes on a certain limited income, about $100 a year, or whose husbands pay taxes on such income.

This law has thoroughly changed the position of married women in Norway. From having always been a minor, the married woman has suddenly become of age.

It may be of interest to you people of the United States-who can show so many taxpaying women without any right to vote-to know that we were not able to get the men of our Parliament interested in the taxpaying woman suffrage question until the bill was put in such a form that it included the married women also. It seemed to hurt these

men's family feelings. It seemed to them so unjust that the wife and mother should still be standing idle on the market place while their aunts and sisters were the only ones to reap the harvest.

But once having the bill before them in the proper form, our men in Parliament changed their opinion, and liked it so well that not only the radical party, that had presented the bill, but many of the conservative party, that for years had been defiant, also gave their vote and made strong speeches in favor of woman suffrage.

The result of this law has been the election of several women to important municipal positions; for instance, members of the common council in the capital, members of the board of aldermen, and at one place a woman has become chief assessor. Women may act on juries and grand juries, and have been appointed members of special congressional commissions. Several women doctors are appointed at the public institutions, on boards of health as experts for the Government, etc. Matrons have been employed at prisons where women are, and special prisons for women in charge of a matron have been established.

On the whole, we begin to see the glory of the rising sun, which will give us, within a little while, the bright, clear day. [Applause.] Miss ANTHONY. I now have the pleasure of introducing to you Mrs. Vida Goldstein, of Australia, where women vote.

STATEMENT OF MISS VIDA GOLDSTEIN.

Miss GOLDSTEIN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I am very proud to think that I have come here from a country where the woman-suffrage movement has made such rapid strides as it has in Australia. The woman-suffrage note was first struck in America, and yet women to-day are struggling here for what we have had in Australia for years and years. And because we have proved all the statements and arguments against woman suffrage to be utterly without foundation, I will take a few minutes of your time just to tell you what our political status is.

It seems incredible to us that the women here in America have not even the school and municipal suffrage, except in a very few States. We have had woman suffrage in Australia for over forty years, and we never hear a word said against it. It is simply taken as a mere matter of course that the women should go and vote. I have a vote in the municipal council, so I can speak from experience in this matter. I have not had it very long, but for the last five or six years, and although I had always taken the very keenest interest in questions of local government, I never before found that members and candidates and canvassers were ready to listen to my opinions on questions of municipal government; but now I find that things are very different. They tell us as soon as women get these privileges they are going to lose the chivalrous attentions of men. Let me assure you that a woman has not the faintest conception of what chivalry means until she gets a vote. [Laughter.]

In the school boards in Australia women are eligible for election as members. I can remember the time, in Australia, when I was quite a young girl, when there was a howl of opposition to women occupying seats on the school board. They had had the school vote for some time, but when it was suggested that a woman should stand for election

as a member of one of these boards there was a howl of indignation on the part of the general public. But the first woman who stood happened to be put up by the suffrage society, which was the strongest in the country, and they were returned at the head of the poll. From that time women have continued to be members of those boards, and in all the districts now many of them are returned; and the work that they do is considered so satisfactory that the men themselves are the very first to acknowledge that it is desirable to have women on every school board in the country.

As regards parliamentary suffrage, the position is this: South Australia, New Zealand, and West Australia have full parliamentary suffrage for women, and the result has been most satisfactory. The elections are the most orderly that have ever been conducted there. The women have not raided the platforms; they have not neglected their homes; they have not gone away and left their babies. Everything goes on in just the same way as before, except that they manage to get alterations in the laws that previously they had been asking for years and years.

In South Australia, Victoria, Queensland, aud Tasmania they have not yet got the parliamentary suffrage, but it is sure to come within this year. The bill for woman suffrage has been introduced in the Houses of Assembly, which are the lower and representative houses of Parliament, over and over again, and every time the bill has been introduced it has secured an increased majority. Eight times now it has passed in Victoria, but it has been blocked by the unrepresentative upper house, which is not elected by the people, but only by a portion of the people.

But now those gentlemen who stood there and blocked our bill every time will have to give way presently, because we now have a federated Australia. And to prove to you the strength of the suffrage movement, I may tell you that the framers of the federal constitution bill were forced to admit that the electors now desired women to have the vote, and they inserted a clause in that instrument giving women the suffrage when they came to deal with their own federal franchise. The elections took place on the franchise existing for the lower house in each state, and as the women in South and West Australia had the right to vote they helped to frame our great Australian Commonwealth.

The federal constitution bill also provides that the suffrage must be made uniform throughout Australia, so that the federal Parliament will have to pass it on the widest franchise existing, and that is in South Australia, where women not only vote but have the right to sit in Parliament; but no woman has ever yet aspired to a seat in Parliament, and that disposes of the argument that the moment women get the vote they are going to rush into Parliament.

Women do not seek public office. That has been the fact in South Australia. When we get national suffrage, state suffrage will follow as a matter of course; because it would be utterly ridiculous to think that we should have the right to vote in national affairs and not in the states, and then these obstructing upper houses will have to give way. This habit of blocking these bills by the upper house has become such a scandal in our country that there are bills being introduced to reform the upper houses. In Victoria a bill will be introduced almost immediately, and the main plank will be woman suffrage. Then it

will be very inspiriting to us to see these gentlemen having to give way.

When Mr. Reeves, the agent general for New Zealand, was speaking at a large public meeting in London four years ago, he said that he was so absolutely convinced that the suffrage had made such progress in South Australia and New Zealand-and had resulted in so much good that he was quite certain that within a very few years women in the whole of Australia would be fully enfranchised. Since he made that statement, West Australia has given women full parliamentary suffrage, and the position is such there that the federal Parliament is bound to give it. The federal houses are both of them elected by the people, and of the first national Parliament elected by the people, four-fifths of the members are pledged to give women the vote.

Miss Blackwell referred to a paper published by the Anti-Suffrage Association. In that paper some statements are made against woman suffrage in New Zealand. The source of that information is a Mr. J. Grattan Grey, a journalist "long resident in Australasia." When you remember that Australasia is bigger than the United States, you can see the absurdity of quoting the opinions of a journalist "long resident in Australasia" against woman suffrage. It would be just as reasonable for some one to quote "a journalist long resident in the United States" against woman suffrage in Colorado or any other one State of the American Union. It does not appear that Mr. Grattan Grey ever resided in New Zealand at all. But this gentleman says:

Not only has woman suffrage not fulfilled any one of the improving and refining services which were claimed for it when the measure was before Parliament, but as an absolute fact public and political life and the personnel of Parliament itself has degenerated to a most deplorable degree ever since the introduction of the female franchise at parliamentary elections in that colony.

You will probably believe me rather than this "journalist long resident in Australasia" when I tell you that those two statements are absolutely untrue. I do not simply voice my own opinions on this matter. I have here the statements of leading representative men and women about the result of woman suffrage in New Zealand. I cite the case of New Zealand because they have had it longest there. They have had it over nine years. These gentlemen are lawyers, clergymen, and educators, men occupying leading positions in the community, representative men occupying good social position.

They say it has distinctly affected legislation. Laws have been made because of it; others have been modified. Changes have been made in the administration of the public service. Changes are being made in public opinion outside the public service. It has raised_the tone of political life, since a better class of men are returned to Parliament. It has raised the tone of election meetings. An election meeting now-a-days is as quiet and orderly as any ordinary public meeting. All the saloons are closed on election day, and a place where liquor is sold may not be used as a polling booth. Every election sees an improvement in the quality of the women's vote.

The statement made in the Victoria legislature that the granting of the suffrage to the women of New Zealand had resulted in the election of men of immoral character to seats in the House of Representatives is not true, and is an undeserved reflection upon the women of this colony. The moral tone of the present House of Representatives is equal, if not superior, to that of any of its predecessors, and the legis W S -3*