Next followed Mrs. Gasson, the speaker for 425 branches and 22,000 members of the Women's Co-operative Guild. She said that the Co-operative movement, with its 62,000,000 members and annual trade of £60,000,000, had often been called a "State within a State." In that State women had votes, they attended quarterly business meetings and voted side by side with men on questions of trade, employment and education. Women were elected as directors of Co-operative societies and also on Educational Committees connected with the Co-operative movement. And yet the prosperity of the co-operative "State" continued to increase, although in many places the women members outnumbered the men. The Co-operative Guild Women saw that when questions affecting the Co-operative movement came before Parliament the movement lost much of its power because the women had no vote. Unwise or unjust taxation was injurious to the Co-operative trade, and women were the chief sufferers by unjust taxation. Whatever taxes were put upon necessaries men did not receive larger incomes, and so women had less to spend. That very month Mr. Birrell had received Resolutions from large conferences of the Co-operative Guild members, urging that medical examination should be made compulsory under the New Education Bill, but the Resolutions were worth nothing without a vote behind them. The women who had sent up these Resolutions felt "like a crying child outside the door of a locked room, demanding entrance with no one to open it." Most of the Co-operators were married working-women. Their houses were both their workshops and their homes, and therefore Housing and public Health questions were especially important to them. Their incomes were affected by laws relating to trades, accidents, pensions and all industrial legislation that went to secure the good health of the workers. Therefore they appealed that this common right, the right of a citizen, should be granted to them and to other women. Mrs. Watson spoke on behalf of the Scottish Christian Union of the British Women's Temperance Association, with a membership of 52,000 women. Then Mrs. Mary Bateson presented a petition for the franchise from 1,530 women graduates, amongst whom were Doctors of Letters, Science and Law in the Universities of the United Kingdom, the British Colonies and the United States.