Senator McLean of Connecticut, anti-suffrage Republican, flatly stated “that all questions involving declarations of war and terms of peace should be left to that sex which must do the fighting and the dying on the battlefield.” And he further said that until boys between 18 and 21 who had just been called to the colors should ask for the vote, “their mothers should be and remain both proud and content” without it. He concluded with an amusing account of the history of the ballot box. “This joint resolution,” he said, “goes beyond the seas and above the clouds. It attempts to tamper with the ballot box, over which mother nature always has had and always will have supreme control; and such attempts always have ended and always will end in failure and misfortune.” Senator Phelan of California, Democrat, made a straightforward, intelligent speech. Senator Beckham of Kentucky, Democrat, deplored the idea that man was superior to woman. He pleaded “guilty to the charge of Romanticism.” He said, “But I look upon woman as superior to man.” Therefore he could not trust her with a vote. He had the hardihood to say further, with the men of the world at each other’s throats, . . . “Woman is the civilizing, refining, elevating influence that holds man from barbarism.” We charged him with ignorance as well as romanticism when he said in closing, “It is the duty of man to work and labor for woman; to cut the wood, to carry the coal, to go into the fields in the necessary labor to sustain the home where the woman presides and by her superior nature elevates him to higher and better conceptions of life.” Meanwhile Senator Shafroth of Colorado, Democrat, lifelong advocate of suffrage, was painstakingly asking one senator after another, as he had been for years, “Does not the Senator believe that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed?” and then—“But if you have the general principle acknowledged that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.” . . . and so forth. But the idea of applying the Declaration of Independence to modern politics fairly put them to sleep. These samples of senatorial profundity may divert, outrage, or bore us, but they do not represent the real battle. It is not that the men who utter these sentiments do not believe them. More is the pity, they do. But they are smoke screens—mere skirmishes of eloquence or foolishness. They do not represent the motives of their political acts.