City and town life -- Fiction; Southern States -- Fiction; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- Fiction
"Three months ago Sarah Mosely died and willed all of her property to
the Co-Citizens' Foundation Fund, with the distinct command that the
interest on this fund shall be spent to get suffrage for women in Jordan
County," she began again. "The property of this Fund consists in
mortgages on nineteen thousand acres of land in this county, in the
ownership of most of the business houses around the square in
Jordantown, in various loans, in 60 per cent. of the stock of the
National Bank, and in other properties, including the _Signal_. That is
to say, gentlemen, if we do not own this county, we control enough of
the property in it to have a right to say how it shall be taxed and
governed. And while there is a law against bribing voters or
intimidating voters, there is no law against foreclosing these loans and
mortgages, nearly all of which are overdue. And I give you my word as
one of the trustees of this Fund, that every one of them shall be
foreclosed as fast as we can do it if our rights as citizens are not
acknowledged with all the privileges that go with citizenship!
"And that is not all! Day before yesterday we purchased from Mr. Mike
Prim the written records of the political workings of the Democratic
party in this county during the past three years--all the letters
written by you men who control the county districts with the money you
received or were to receive for your services, and other letters even
more interesting--but not a single statement of what you actually did
with these contributions. I have not had time to go over Mr. Prim's
memoirs carefully, but as near as I can make out it has been a
blood-sucking business. Some of you have paid as high as three hundred
dollars a year to the campaign fund, and some of you have received as
much as a thousand dollars for delivering this town, say, in an
election, while your wives pinched and scraped to pay the preachers and
support missions in foreign fields! The appropriations for county
schools have been bitten into with outrageous expense accounts which
took thousands of dollars from the already meagre appropriations.
"I say these papers and letters are now the property of the Co-Citizens'
Foundation; and if necessary we shall use them, spend your reputations
as ruthlessly and extravagantly for our ends as you have spent the taxes
of this county for your political purposes.
"The time has passed, men, when we are to be deceived by that foolish
fallacy by which you have so long even deceived yourselves: that women
win by their gentle influence over you. They don't! If they influence
you at all it is for your good, not theirs. We are in the position to
use the same lever that you have always had--power--and we shall use it.
If you defeat us, you must destroy yourselves, your credit, and your
reputation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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