The very next day occurred a remarkable example of direct action: that direct action coming within twenty-four hours. Senator Jones, who the day before had refused to bring up Suffrage in this session, arose in the Senate and announced that on September 26, he would move to take up the Suffrage Amendment, and keep it before the Senate until a vote was reached.

With this promise of definite action, the Woman’s Party immediately ceased their demonstrations.

On September 26, Senator Jones brought the Amendment up. Maud Younger says, in her Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist:

Discussion began. Discussion went on. For five whole days it lasted, with waves of hope and waves of dismay, and always an undercurrent of uncertainty. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, the speeches went on. On Monday word went forth that the President would address the Senate on behalf of our Amendment.

I hurried to Senator Curtis, who was in his office signing letters. He said: “The other side claim that they have their men pledged: that the President comes too late. What do you expect?”

“I don’t know what I should expect. I hope.”

I went over to the Senate. There was very great excitement; a sense of something wonderful impending. On the floor there was the ceremonious atmosphere that attends the President’s coming.

“Look,” said a newspaper man in the gallery beside me, “he’s brought all his heavy artillery with him.” There on the floor of the Senate were the members of the Cabinet. Lesser dignitaries were scattered about the room. Congressmen stood, two-deep, 367lining the walls. The Sergeant-at-Arms announced in clear tones: “The President of the United States.”

The President came in, shook hands with the presiding officer, turned and read his speech. There is always an evenness about his public utterances, in manner, in voice, in reading; yet I thought he read this message with more feeling than his War message, or his Fourteen Points.

The President said:

Gentlemen of the Senate: The unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the view not only of our own people and our own consciences but also in the view of all nations and peoples will, I hope, justify in your thought, as it does in mine, the message I have come to bring you.

I regard the concurrence of the Senate in the constitutional Amendment proposing the extension of the Suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged. I have come to urge upon you the considerations which have led me to that conclusion. It is not only my privilege, it is also my duty to apprise you of every circumstance and element involved in this momentous struggle which seems to me to affect its very processes and its outcome. It is my duty to win the war and to ask you to remove every obstacle that stands in the way of winning it.

I had assumed that the Senate would concur in the Amendment because no disputable principle is involved but only a question of the method by which the Suffrage is to be extended to women. There is and can be no Party issue involved in it. Both of our great national Parties are pledged, explicitly pledged, to equality of Suffrage for the women of the country.

Neither Party, therefore, it seems to me, can justify hesitation as to the method of obtaining it, can rightfully hesitate to substitute Federal initiative for State initiative, if the early adoption of this measure is necessary to the successful prosecution of the war and if the method of State action proposed in Party platforms of 1916 is impracticable within any reasonable length of time, if practicable at all.

And its adoption is, in my judgment, clearly necessary to the successful prosecution of the war and the successful realization of the object for which the war is being fought.

That judgment I take the liberty of urging upon you with solemn earnestness for reasons which I shall state very frankly and which I shall hope will seem as conclusive to you as they seem to me.

This is a peoples’ war and the peoples’ thinking constitutes 368its atmosphere and morale, not the predilections of the drawing-room or the political considerations of the caucus.

If we be indeed Democrats and wish to lead the world to democracy, we can ask other peoples to accept in proof of our sincerity and our ability to lead them whither they wish to be led nothing less persuasive and convincing than our actions. Our professions will not suffice. Verification must be forthcoming when verification is asked for. And in this case verification is asked for—asked for in this particular matter. You ask by whom?

Not through diplomatic channels; not by foreign ministers. Not by the intimations of parliaments. It is asked for by the anxious, expectant, suffering peoples with whom we are dealing and who are willing to put their destinies in some measure in our hands, if they are sure that we wish the same things they do.

I do not speak by conjecture. It is not alone the voices of statesmen and of newspapers that reach me, and the voices of foolish and intemperate agitators do not reach me at all. Through many, many channels I have been made aware what the plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon whom the chief terror and suffering of this tragic war falls.

They are looking to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think in their logical simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them. If we reject measures like this, in ignorance or defiance of what a new age has brought forth, of what they have seen but we have not, they will cease to believe in us; they will cease to follow or to trust us.

They have seen their own governments accept this interpretation of democracy—seen old governments accept this interpretation of democracy—seen old governments like that of Great Britain, which did not profess to be democratic, promise readily and as of course this justice to women, though they had before refused it, the strange revelations of this war having made many things new and plain, to governments as well as to people.

Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson? Are we alone to ask and take the utm............