protect the whisky traffic everywhere.  In my city the women did not crusade the streets, but they said they would help the men to execute the law.  They held meetings, sent out committees, and had testimony secured against every man who had violated the law, and when the board of excise held its meeting those women assembled, three or four hundred, in the church one morning, and marched in a solid body to the common council chamber where the board of excise was sitting.  As one rum-seller after another brought in his petition for a renewal of license who had violated the law, those women presented the testimony against him.  The law of the State of New York is that no man shall have a renewal who has violated the law.  But in not one case did that board refuse to grant a renewal of license because of the testimony which those women presented, and at the close of the sitting it was found that twelve hundred more licenses had been granted than ever before in the history of the State.  Then the defeated women said they would have those men punished according to law.

Again they retained an attorney and appointed committees to investigate all over the city.  They got the proper officer to prosecute every rum-seller.  I was at their meeting.  One woman reported that the officer in every city refused to prosecute the liquor dealer who had violated the law.  Why?  Because if he should do so he would lose the votes of all the employes of certain shops on that street, if another he would lose the votes of the railroad employes, and if another he would lose the German vote, if another the Irish vote, and so on.  I said to those women what I say to you, and what I know to be true to-day, that if the women of the city of Rochester had held the power of the ballot in their hands they would have been a great political balance of power.

The last report was from District Attorney Raines.  The women complained of a certain lager-beer-garden keeper.  Said the district attorney, “Ladies, you are right, this man is violating the law, everybody knows it, but if I should prosecute him I would lose the entire German vote.”  Said I, “Ladies, do you not see that if the women of the city of Rochester had the right to vote District Attorney Raines would have been compelled to have stopped and counted, weighed and measured.  He would have said, ’If I prosecute that lager-beer German I shall lose the 5,000 German votes of this city, but if I fail to prosecute him and execute the laws I shall lose the votes of 20,000 women.’”

Do you not see, gentlemen, that so long as you put this power of the ballot in the hands of every possible man, rich, poor, drunk, sober, educated, ignorant, outside of the State’s prison, to make and unmake, not only every law and law-maker, but every office holder who has to do with the executing of the law, and take the power from the hands of the women of the nation, the mothers,