school questions, or the questions of liquor license.  It has been shown very clearly why we need something more than that.  You have good enough laws to-day in every State in this Union for the suppression of what are termed the social vices; for the suppression of the grog-shops, the gambling houses, the brothels, the obscene shows.  There is plenty of legislation in every State in this Union for their suppression if it could be executed.  Why is the Government, why are the States and the cities, unable to execute those laws?  Simply because there is a large balance of power in every city that does not want those laws executed.  Consequently both parties must alike cater to that balance of political power.  The party that puts a plank in its platform that the laws against the grog-shops and all the other sinks of iniquity must be executed, is the party that will not get this balance of power to vote for it, and, consequently, the party that can not get into power.

What we ask of you is that you will make of the women of the cities a balance of political power, so that when a mayor, a member of the common council, a supervisory justice of the peace, a district attorney, a judge on the bench even, shall go before the people of that city as a candidate for the suffrages of the people he shall not only be compelled to look to the men who frequent the grog-shops, the brothels, and the gambling houses, who will vote for him if he is not in favor of executing the law, but that he shall have to look to the mothers, the sisters, the wives, the daughters of those deluded men to see what they will do if he does not execute the law.

We want to make of ourselves a balance of political power.  What we need is the power to execute the laws.  We have got laws enough.  Let me give you one little fact in regard to my own city of Rochester.  You all know how that wonderful whip called the temperance crusade roused the whisky ring.  It caused the whisky force to concentrate itself more strongly at the ballot-box than ever before, so that when the report of the elections in the spring of 1874 went over the country the result was that the whisky ring was triumphant, and that the whisky ticket was elected more largely than ever before.  Senator Thurman will remember how it was in his own State of Ohio.  Everybody knows that if my friends, Mrs. ex-Governor Wallace, Mrs. Allen, and all the women of the great West could have gone to the ballot-box at those municipal elections and voted for candidates, no such result would have occurred; while you refused by the laws of the State to the women the right to have their opinions counted, every rumseller, every drunkard, every pauper even from the poor-house, and every criminal outside of the State’s prison came out on election day to express his opinion and have it counted.

The next result of that political event was that the ring demanded new legislation to