SUFFRAGETTE'S PLEA FOR CAUSE

Mrs. Maud Wood Park discussed the equal suffrage question last night before a discouragingly small number of men in Emerson in a competent and not overly-prejudiced manner. Basing her arguments for the granting of equal suffrage to women on two main lines of thought and fact she showed the fairness and strength which these arguments possessed, and at the same time attacked the objections which the agitation for this cause has called forth.

Mrs. Park rested her case for equal suffrage on the premises of democracy and the "woman movement," cleverly defining the latter as "the recent discovery on the part of a large number of women that they belong to the human race instead of being merely a Ladies Aid Society."

She grouped the objections to the cause as coming from two main sources: the primary and greatest emanating from man's confident, although unfair belief, that women can never become competent voters, and therefore would be a detriment to good government; the second and less worthy objection being the fear possessed by a majority of men that women would venture beyond their sphere of duties.

Mrs. Park denied that this latter objection to the cause was a real one, but classified it as the fear of the conservative and timid that any change, social, legal, or industrial, in the status of woman would do a great harm to women and thence to the family. She closed with the plea that the whole woman suffrage question depends on people thinking in the light of reason and justice, instead of seeing the cause through the mist of their own prejudices or the conservatism which is bred of custom; in short, that people should consider the question on its own merits.