which there has been much comment throughout the nation, and yet, when an old army nurse applies for a pension, a woman who is broken down by her devotion to the nation in hospitals and upon the battle-field, she is met at the door of the Pension Bureau by this statement, “the Government has made no appropriation for the services of women in the war.”  One of these women is an old nurse whom some of you may remember, Mother Bickerdyke, who went out onto many a battle-field when she was in the prime of life, twenty years ago, and at the risk of her life lifted men, who were wounded, in her arms, and carried them to a place of safety.  She is an old woman now, and where is she?  What reward the nation bestowed to her faithful services?  The nation has a pension for every man who has served this nation, even down to the boy recruit who was out but three months; but Mother Bickerdyke, though her health has never been good since her service then, is earning her living at the wash-tub, a monument to the ingratitude of a Republic as great as was that when Belisarius begged in the streets of Rome.

I bring up this illustration alone out of innumerable others that are possible, to try to impress upon your minds that we are forgotten.  It is not from any unkindness on your part.  Who would think for one moment, looking upon the kindly faces of this committee, that any man on it would do an injustice to women, especially if she were old and feeble?  But because we have no right to vote, as I said, our interests are overlooked and forgotten.

It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage.  I wish to remind you of the fact that in the enormous immigration that pours to our shores every year, numbering somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million, there come, twice as many men as women.  The figures for the last year were two hundred and twenty-three thousand men, and one hundred and thirteen thousand women.

What does this mean?  It means a steady influx of this foreign element; it means a constant preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the foreigner as compared to the native born.  To those who fear that our American institutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign nations or of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American-born women, And of all other women also, so that if the foreign-born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a preponderance on the side of the liberty which is secured by our institutions.

It is because, as many of my predecessors have said, of the different elements represented by the two sexes, that we are asking for this