derful bee-line fashion of carrying it all home to my own Methodist hive. I couldn't do any other way. I am made that fashion; it is part of me. It is worked into the woof and warp of my spirit, the result of the sweet old ways in which I was brought up. I should have to deny myself in my inmost heart, if I didn't believe what mother had taught me at her knee, if I didn't, above all the teachings and all the voices, reverence the voice that calls to me from the pages of the Bible; if I didn't, above all things and always, in my mentality and spirituality, translate God into terms of Jesus Christ. I cannot rest except there. And so I frankly tell you how it is with me this sweet Easter day. The inmost voice, deep down in my heart, says: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit! Receive it as I sit here listening to women whom I love and revere and honor for their loyalty to what they believe is the highest and best. Receive it as I go forth into the crowded ways of life with so many voices calling me on every hand. Receive my spirit!" It will be the last thought that this brain will think, it will be the last quiver of this heart that has ached and rejoiced, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!"

I don't know that it will make me stand any better with the ladies of the audience, and certainly it won't with the gentlemen, I suppose, but, honestly, I always thought that, next to a wish I had to be a saint some day, I really would like to be a politician.

* *

Now, I was a farmer's daughter, and got this idea of politics through father's and mother's talks together, as much as from the newspapers. I remember so well sitting by and listening to their talk, and mother was a very motherly woman, and a tremendously potential politician, though I don't think she ever knew it, and I only discovered it within the last fourteen years. I never knew quite what was the matter with her, but in these days I believe she was born to be a Senator, and never got there. * Then my brother came to be twenty-one, and we had gone around the pastures and prairies together; we had kept along in our ideas and ambitions; we had studied the same books and had the same general purposes. But lo and behold! there came a day when there was a separation. I saw that voting made it, and it seemed to me the line was artificial and should be broken down. Then I said to myself: "My politics is sacred; there isn't anything about it with which a pure heart, serving its kind, wouldn't like to have to do, But it is a kind of poor man that went down to Jericho. Now, can't we get politics out of the company of thieves into which it has fallen? Cannot we get it out from among the beasts of Ephesus? Are we going to pass by on the other side or are we going to come, like the good Samaritan, and to make politics a home question, something that women care for and are greatly interested in?

If to all this our brothers answer, "It is not because you women are inferior that we don't want you to vote, but because you are too good and nice and

594

Aunt Columbia's Kitchen.

pure to come into politics,” then I say to you: "My friend, we don't expect to leave political affairs as we find them; not at all. You, our brothers, all alone by yourselves and no women with you, have constructed this "filthy pool" that you talk about so much, and that you don't admire, and you can't make it any worse. You know that into the witch's broth they pour all the ingredients together. Now, you have all the ingredients there are, except women's votes. Turn them in; it may be the branch of sweetness that it needs; and certainly it can't be any worse." So I want to say to my brothers, that we are coming in, as we believe, just as we should go into a bachelor's hall. We should take along broom and dust-brushes and dust-pans, open the windows and ventilate the place, and try to have a general "clarin" out, and that is exactly what we want to do in Old Aunt Columbia's kitchen. Brother Jonathan hasn't kept house there in an orderly and cleanly manner, and if ever a place needed "clarin" out we think it is the kitchen of Uncle Sam. So we have made up our minds and you will see us coming in, and nothing on this universal earth will keep us out of it. It seems to me just the difference between the smoking-car and the parlor-car; in the smoking-car there are men alone, and in the parlor-car men and women together. And how nice and wholesome it is in the parlor-car; and how everything but wholesome and nice it is in the smoking-car. It seems to us women that every great thought must be incarnated, that disembodied principles and disembodied spirits fare about equally well in this work-a-day world; that every principle seeks a hand that can cast its ballot into the urn, where a republic manufactures its own destiny. And so we believe that into this magnificent scene we may well enter, because the weapons are not carnal, but spiritual. We believe that when coal in the mine and not in the grate will warm you; when flour in the barrel and not in the loaf will feed you; when wool on the sheep's back, and not woven into cloth will clothe you, then public sentiment that is lying around loose and not gathered up through the electric battery of the ballot-box, or sent tingling along the wires of law, will change the ways of men.

God made woman with her faculties, her traits, her way of looking at all great questions from the highest to the lowest, and he made her to be a helpmeet for man, and he made man to be a helpmeet for her; he made them to stand side by side, sun-crowned; he made them to stand in a republic, as I believe, bearing equally its magnificent burdens. I like to see how men are grandly meeting the uprising of womanhood. I recognize, and all of us here do, that it was our big brother man who said, Come and sit down beside me at the banquet of Minerva. I recognize, and so do we all, that it was a man that encouraged us when we made our first ventures; that it is not with any special purpose to keep us down that men do not let us enter into politics, but that they are sort of considering it; they are waiting for us to be a little more anxious. They are waiting themselves to get wonted to the notion, and they are growing rapidly. The time is not distant, and every man knows it who hears me.

The Widening Horizon.

595

But I do not forget that if we come, you and you only must open the

You are told that public opinion seems to demand the saloon, and as a White-Ribboner I ask, “Whose public opinion? That of the home?" Oh, no; the home is solidly against it." "Whose public opinion? That of the church?" "Oh, no; two-thirds of the church is made up of women." "Whose public opinion?" That of men who drink and men who sell, and men in professional, business and political life, who don't like to get the illwill of those who drink and sell. Thus, as the outcome of deliberate choice, based upon motives wholly selfish, these men have saddled the liquor traffic on this nation. But the nation has great guns of power pointing sublimely up into vacancy. We want to bring them to the level of our use, and send their shot banging into the eyes of the foe. It is this purpose of arming women with the ballot that makes me so perfectly at home on a platform like the present. It is this which brings me to do homage to these grand pioneers, just as you do, and no one can pay them too much gratitude and honor.

Let us be grateful that our horizon is widening. We women have learned to reason from effect to cause. It is considered a fine sign of a thinker to be able to reason from cause to effect. But we, in fourteen years' march, have learned to go from the drunkard in the gutter, who was the object lesson we first saw, back to the children, as you will hear to-night; back to the idea of preventive, educational, evangelistic, social, and legal work for temperance; back to the basis of the saloon itself. We have found that the liquor traffic is joined hand in hand with the very sources of the National Government. And we have come to the place where we want prohibition, first, last, and all the time. While the brewer talks about his "vested interests," I lend my voice to the motherhood of the nation that has gone down into the valley of unutterable pain and in the shadow of death, with the dews of eternity upon the mother's brow, given birth and being to the sons who are the "vested interests" of America's homes.

We offset the demand of the brewer and distiller, that you shall protect their ill-gotten gains, with the thought of these most sacred treasures, dear to the hearts that you, our brothers, honor-dear to the hearts that you love best. I bring to you this thought to-night, that you shall vote to represent us, and hasten the time when we can represent ourselves.

I believe that we are going out into this work, being schooled and inspired for greater things than we have dreamed, and that the esprit de corps of women will prove the grandest sisterhood the world has ever known. As I have seen the love and kindness and good-will of women who differed so widely from us politically and religiously, and yet have found away down in the depths of their hearts the utmost love and affection, I have said, what kind of a world will this be when all women are as fond of each other as we strong-minded women are?