there was no outcry made against it. I have yet to hear of any Bishop in the Church, or any presiding elder, or any minister challenging the right of women to vote in Electoral Conferences or Quarterly Conferences; and yet for sixteen years they have been voting in these bodies; voting to send laymen here to legislate; to send laymen to the General Conference to elect Bishops and Editors and Book Agents and Secretaries. They come to where votes count in making up this body; they have been voting sixteen years, and only now, when the logical result of the right of suffrage that the General Conference gave to women appears and confronts us by women coming here to vote as delegates, do we rise up and protest. I believe that it is at the wrong time that the protest comes. It should have come when the right to vote was granted to women in the Church. It is sixteen years too late, and as was very wisely said by Dr. Potts, the objection comes not so much from the Constitution of the Church as from the "constitution of the men," who challenge these women.

   Now, sir, another parallel. You take the United States Government just after the war, when the colored people of the South, the freedmen of our land, unable to take care of themselves, their friends, that had fought the battles of the war, in Congress determined that they should be protected, if no longer by bayonets and cannon, that they should be protected by placing the ballot in their hands, and the ballot was placed in the hands of the freedman of the South by the action of the National Congress, Congress submitting a constitutional amendment to the legislatures of the States; and when enough of them had voted in favor of it, and the President had signed the bill, it became an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, granting to the people of the South, who had been disfranchised, the right of suffrage.

   Now, what does the right of suffrage do? It carries with it the right to hold office. Where women have the privileges of voting on the school question, they are granted the privilege of being school directors, holding the office of superintendents, and the restriction on them stops at that point under statute law. If you go a little further you will find that when the freedmen were enfranchised, and they sent men of their own color to the House of Representatives, did that body say "stop!" "we protest, you cannot come in because of illegality"? No. They were admitted on the face of their credentials because they had first been granted the right of suffrage. When men of their color went to the United States Senate and submitted their credentials, they were not protested against, but they were 

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