"Gentlemen, in every community there are a handful of women who can be relied upon to carry on church and philanthropic and reform work; but we all know that the vast majority are indifferent, and that they neither help nor hinder. And then there is a third class, of women--the wrongminded. They do not hinder reform work now, because they cannot. "But, gentlemen, when you give the ballot to all women your handful of earnest women in each community, who are willing to give their time and thought to reform work, will have only their handful of ballots to cast for reform measures; your great mass of indifferent women will be indifferent still, and will omit to cast their ballots, and your very considerable number of wrongminded women will have had a weapon put into their hands which they will not omit to use against your reform measures, because it is of importance to them to see to it that their way of life is not interfered with. "So for the sake of reform which women have done in the past, and ought to be able to do in the future, we beg of you not to tie their hands and hamper them by giving suffrage to women!" That is the matter in a nutshell--and proofs of the correctness of this statement are constantly multiplying. In an attempt to prove that woman suffrage will not lead women to neglect their homes, a writer signing herself "Annie Laurie" says in the San Francisco Examiner: "I've been in Denver when a good man was being maligned and almost robbed by political enemies, and he needed the vote of every good woman in town to keep the good work he had done from being stultified. And do you think you could get a single woman out to vote for that man if she wanted to go to a 'tea' or to stay at home and knit socks for the new baby? You could not." This is just what anti-suffragists maintain--that the great body of home-making women will not vote. The Woman Citizen, a suffrage publication of California, in its July issue, bears testimony on this question as follows: "There are today many women in California and other States of the union who, being enfranchised, are too indifferent to vote. We are loath to believe that these women--thousands of them in the United States--are aware of the wrong they are doing. We do not think they know they are shirking a fundamental duty of citizenship. Too many ballots are cast in the cause of dishonesty and corruption. Honest and law-abiding citizens must exert their united strength at the polls to uphold honesty and good government. There are too many women today who are priviliged to vote, yet refrain from doing so either because they do not believe a woman should go to the polls, or because for some inexcusable reason they have neglected to register. They regard their franchise as an invitation to a bridge party, something they can accept or reject as their fancy dictates."