A wider range in the duties of government is opposed by many of you as objectionable paternalism. Such of you overlook the fact that there can be no paternalism in a republic. Such a system is co-operation pure and simple, and neither good nor evil can permanently exist without the consent of the whole. The nearer you get to complete co-operation, the more perfect your government becomes. The greatest vices of misgovernment among you are to be found in granting precedence of one interest over others, that interest in most cases being a capitalistic one, often antagonizing the welfare of many individuals. Among your industrial class, less than one-tenth are employers, whose political weight has so overcome the majority as to have excluded any direct legislation in its behalf, and so far as these conditions exist, the principle of co-operation which should be the corner stone of your government has not been faithfully carried out. A greater, and in our view, a more glaring violation of this principle is your exclusion of women from the rights of representation in your government. You cannot deny that they have separate interests to care for. You will find upon examination of your assessment rolls that nearly one-fifth of all your real and personal estate is owned by them, and of the greater part of the balance they are interested by matrimonial partnerships with men. Their property ownerships alone entitle them to the rights of suffrage, in the denial of which you have no excuse whatever but the usage and custom of barbaric ages extended to the present, and the prejudice of a society grown familiar and blinded to its injustice. The struggles of labor for better recognition, and the agitation for woman suffrage are evolutionary movements in thought, and in your advanced government indicate the coming of a more perfect co-operation. The political subjection of women, and the subjection of labor helplessly to the law of supply and demand, without legislative assistance or attention, are at present your most prominent relics of barbarism. They are both endured because the parties to be benefitted have never yet enjoyed the privileges due them. Neither one or the other are consequently aroused to action in their own behalf, and when these rights are acquired by them it will be more owing to an enlightened public opinion than to any concerted action by themselves. It is well known that your slaves had little to do with the abolition of slavery, and it is therefore not a proper argument against the granting of these privileges that the persons to be benefitted are not all clamoring for them; or that, in the case of woman suffrage, a large majority of women are indifferent and a few opposed.