At one evening session Miss Grace H. Ballantyne, attorney in the noted City Hall case at Des Moines, Iowa, gave a spirited account of the way in which the women's right to vote on issuing bonds was sustained. Mrs. Kate Trimble Woolsey (Ky.), who had resided some years in England, compared the condition of women in that country and the United States to the disadvantage of the latter, "where," she said, "the women did not profit by the Declaration of Independence but on the contrary lost when the colonies were supplanted by the republic. In this they discover that a republic may endure as a political institution to the end of time without conferring recognition, honors or power on women; that it can exist as an oligarchy of sex, and they say: 'Why should we be loyal to this government?' Thus through women republicanism itself is imperiled and I tell you that if an amendment is not added to the National Constitution giving women the power to vote, this republic, within the living generation, will find that prophecy, 'Woman is the rock upon which our Ship of State is to founder,' will be fulfilled." As chairman of the Committee on Peace and Arbitration Mrs. Lucia Ames Mead gave a report of its many activities. In 1907 she had attended a plenary session at The Hague Peace Conference, which she described in glowing terms, and she went as a delegate in September to an International Peace Conference in Munich. In July, 1908, she went to one in London, where Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood of Washington, D. C., presented a paper on the Central American Peace Congress, held in that city, and the recently established Arbitration Court, which formed the basis of three resolutions adopted by the congress. She told of the new society, the American School Peace League to improve the teaching of history and in every way promote international fraternity, sympathy and justice. During business meetings the following were among the recommendations adopted: To recommend to States to continue a systematic and specialized distribution of literature; to secure and present to Congress at an early date a petition asking for a 16th Amendment enfranchising women, the chair to appoint a committee to superintend this work; to try to obtain the appointment of a U. S. Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage favorable to it; to send letters simultaneously to the President of the United States in advance of the time for writing his message, followed by telegrams one week preceding the opening of Congress, expressing the wishes of women for the ballot; to ask their Legislatures for some form of suffrage and follow up this request with systematic legislative work; to urge that States having any form of partial suffrage take measures to secure the largest possible use of it by women. It was decided to appropriate $125 for two months' work in South Dakota to ascertain conditions with a view to the submission of a State amendment.