Indiana, I know that we have the intelligent, thinking, cultured, pure, patriotic men and women with us.  We have the women who are engaged in philanthropic enterprises.  We have in our own State the signatures of over 5,000 of the school teachers asking for woman’s ballot.  I ask you if the United States Government does not need the voice of those 5,000 educated school teachers as much as it needs the voice of the 240 male criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the penitentiary of Indiana every year, who go to the ballot-box upon every question whatever, and make laws under which those school teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must keep their homes and rear their children?

On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws that shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority that only has been made legal, but is never recognized, and so I ask you to let the mothers carry their influence in protecting laws around the footsteps of those boys, even after their hair has turned gray and they have seats in the United States Congress.  I ask you to give them the power to throw protecting laws around those boys to the very confines of eternity.  This can be done in no indirect way; it can not be done by the silent influence; it can not be done by prayer.  While I do not underestimate the power of prayer, I say give me my ballot on election day that shall send pure men, good men, intelligent men, statesmen, instead of the modern politician, into our legislative halls.  I would rather have that ballot on election day than the prayers of all the disfranchised women in the universe.

So I ask you to loosen our hands.  I ask you to let us join with you in developing this science of human government.  What is politics after all but the science of government?  We are interested in these questions, and we are investigating them already.  We have our opinions.  Recently an able man has said that we have been grandly developed physically and mentally, but as a nation we are a political infant.  So we are, gentlemen; we are to-day in America politically simply an infant.  Why is it?  It is because we have not recognized God’s family plan in government—­man and woman together.  He created the male and female, and gave them dominion together.  We have dominion in every other interest in society, and why shall we not stand shoulder to shoulder and have dominion, in the science in government, in making the laws under which we shall live?

We are taxed to support this Government—­this immense Capitol building is built largely from the industries of the tax-paying women of this country—­and yet we are denied the slightest voice in distributing our taxes.  Our foreparents did not object to taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation, and we, as