POLITICS

"Another agent working to-day against our merchant marine, as it has been for the last fifty years, is politics, both in its broad and narrow significance. Politics has made port development and port administration a football for selfish ends. Politics has misused port appropriations for party spoils. Political river and harbor appropriations are unfair to the great ports on the North Atlantic coast, which have been willing to spend their own money on port development and have been refused their fair portion of National appropriations, while Southern rivers, hundreds of miles from navigable waters, are being developed at public expense. "The same amount of money spent in developing the Merrimack, Taunton, or Connecticut Rivers which has been spent digging ditches in the sand in Texas and other Southern States would open up a hundred times more commerce for every dollar spent.

"While other factors contribute to the abandonment of our Merchant Marine, the principal cause was the theory that we did not need anything for the prosperity of our people, but our own markets, and the developing of our manufacturing industries for our own people and keeping alien products out. This resulted in a high tariff policy and did away with the necessity of a Merchant Marine. The oppressive shipping laws which have driven the United States flag off the seas is a natural result. On this theory, manufacturing and not agriculture was the only interest to be considered. The decline in agricultural products, considering the growth of the Nation, which in recent years has forced the United States to import more food products than we exported, is another result. The forced growth in manufacturing industries which enables our wage-earners to produce in eight or nine months all of the manufactures that the Nation can consume in a year, necessitating selling the surplus in foreign markets or throwing our wage-earners out of employment for a part of each year is another result.

"The great political factor working against our American merchant marine is, therefore, a partisan and selfish tariff, and inasmuch as there have always been enough Democracts, in the United States Senate particularly, to play the selfish tariff game, the blame is not fairly to be placed on any party.

"In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, when the United States was changing from an agricultural to a manufacturing basis, the fundamental economic difference between Free Trade and High Protection required division into party lines. For more than 20 years the two extremes have been getting closer together until now there is only a paper wall dividing the average Democrat and Republican on tariff matters. Those desiring the tariff kept in politics are only its selfish beneficiaries. The Home Marketer and Free Trade have both been thrown in the same discard. We have had a number of Democratic and Republican tariffs during the past generation, and every tariff bill to the Underwood Bill, which cannot be said to be a failure or success because the War has come to stop imports, has carried higher duties than the tariff that it replaced.

"What the Nation needs is a permanent, expert, non-partisan tariff

commission is constant session, investigating the needs of our industrial concerns in competition with similar European countries, that will give us a tariff to compensate the American manufacturers for the difference in labor cost between this and competing European countries, and a small margin for safety. When this is done if the American manufacturer cannot succeed in competition he would not succeed under any subsidy, however high.

COOPERATION

"While the task of rehabilitating our port is a difficult one, it is possible of solution. The situation we find ourselves in to-day is due only to indifference.

"The men at the head of the great New England railroad systems who will be the most important factors in bringing about the desired changes are not personally responsible for any of the railroad's wrong-doings from which this section has suffered. Each and all of them are patriotic citizens who seem to be acting in good faith and with whom it is a pleasure to do business. I am inclined to think, however, that Boston will come very much nearer getting what she is after in the way of improved trade, the closer we stick to the fact that what a railroad does is in the selfish belief that the railroad corporation will profit thereby. When any group of railroads reach a compromise on some policy or on some fabric of rates, or attempt to get together to accomplish definite purpose, the demands of the railroad companies involved are selfish, each and every one, and we would be asking too much of human nature if it were otherwise.

"When it comes down to business, Boston will get what it needs by giving or withholding something which some railroad or all the railroads want and cannot do without, and which we can give or withhold. The less we talk about the 'equity' of things the better. New England is at a disadvantage geographically, and is at a disadvantage because the financial control of the railroads is away from Boston, and they are not inclined to help New England any more than they can help. We must make up our minds once and for all that this section must stand as a united district against all the world or yield its industrial supremacy. The password must be 'New England over all.'

SUCCESS

"I do not expect, I cannot hope, that my ideas will be accepted in full, but as Lady Gregory said about the Irish people, 'I feel it is better to quarrel than to be lonesome.' Until very recent times port development in Massachusetts has been lonesome because nobody thought it worth while even to discuss it. If anything I can say, or any work I can do, will arouse the enthusiasm of Boston people to the advantage of their neglected harbor, if I can stir them to remember that they are citizens of a great city which, while it may anger one to-day for its extreme provincialism, to-morrow will lead in some great act of charity or forward humanitarian movement which astonishes and delights the world, I will be satisfied.

"When we consider the churches, hospitals, museums, and institutions of learning which make Boston the best city in the United States to live in, and realize that with the natural advantage for commerce that we have in our harbor, and that all we must do is to eliminate the obstacles impeding its progress, I am reminded of one of Maeterlinck's beautiful fables wherein he tells the story of the search of a family for happiness, which he pictures as a bluebird. They chase this elusive bluebird all over the world, sometimes seeing it, but never catching it; finally to return home. disconsolate at the failure of their search, only to discover that the bluebird has never left home and is always there to be found. The application of this fable to Boston Harbor is obvious. Having sought commercial supremacy everywhere, we come back to Boston to realize that in our port it has always been here, neglected and disused.

Tuesday Evening, October 19

EQUAL SUFFRAGE DEBATE

In view of the pending vote on equal suffrage by Massachusetts voters, the Club had the issue discussed by four well-known citizens, whose practical experience with politics, as well as their reflections. on the equities of the franchise right, made their words weighty.

At the preliminary dinner, Vice-President Fitzgerald presiding, Messrs. F. T. Kurt, Mitchell Wing, and Col. John P. Irish, of California, spoke.

Hon. Louis A. Frothingham presided over the meeting in the auditorium, and Hon. Joseph Walker opened the debate, speaking for equality of suffrage rights as between the sexes. He said:

HON. JOSEPH WALKER

"I remember when I first went to the Legislature, now some ten or twelve years ago, we used to give a whole day to the discussion of woman suffrage, and the galleries were full and were interested; but I take it that there was not a member of the Legislature that looked upon the discussion as anything more than academic. We were always sure of hearing an eloquent speech against it from Robert Luce, which was not well taken in the galleries, but too well taken by the members of the House, and a few feeble remarks offered occasionally by myself. I remember, in 1907, I think it was, I made my first woman suffrage speech in the House, and I think it was that year that the movement dropped to its lowest ebb, for we had only seventeen votes. But since that time this question has taken hold of the minds and hearts of the men and women, and far from being now an academic question, it is perhaps the most live question before the people of the United States. Finally the Legislature of Massachusetts voted the necessary two times, in two different Legislatures, to submit the question to the people of Massachusetts, and now

Massachusetts is about to speak. On November second next you will have to vote as citizens, and you will have to vote affirmatively or negatively in regard to this great question. Therefore it is a serious matter, and I hope that you will give serious attention to the arguments that may be put forth.

"In discussing this question in the first place, I wish to state what seems to me the fundamental and the conclusive reasons why women should have the right to participate as men participate in self-government. I look upon women as citizens and as individuals as intelligent and as moral beings, and I trust that I will be able to convince you, if you are not already convinced, that they are competent to cast a ballot, and it seems to me that if we can prove that women are competent to express themselves at the ballot box, then this question is settled. It ought to be settled at least in a democratic government. It ought to be settled in a community that believes in self-government, where men believe they have a right to express themselves upon the laws under which they live and who will say what taxes will be raised and how the money raised shall be spent. "We in Massachusetts are committed, for better or worse, to self-government and universal manhood suffrage. The only people whom we exclude from the ballot today are the incompetent, that is the young who have not yet obtained sufficient age, or those who for some mental or moral reason are excluded. All of us admit we have a very light educational test, merely a reading and writing test. Further than that we all enjoy the right of self-government. Now it seems to me that in a democracy like Massachusetts, to deny any competent citizen the right to vote is essentially undemocratic, ungenerous, and highly inexpedient.

MEN AND WOMEN EQUAL

"We all of us will admit, I am sure (I do not have to argue that question), that individually men and women are equal. We also must admit, in Massachusetts at least, that women are fully as well educated as men. There are more women than men turned out of your public schools, and those of us who have sat side by side with women in the public schools realize fully that they are intellectually quite as strong as men. It seems to me that it is only the bitterest irony that those men who would employ women for long hours at labor, often under unsanitary conditions, and frequently at very small pay, it seems to me it is the bitterest irony for such men to say that women are not physically strong enough to exercise intelligently the right of suffrage. Therefore on what ground can suffrage be denied to women?

"Have women the experience which will fit them to cast an intelligent vote? I believe that women should cast the vote as mothers, as home-makers, and from that point of view,- but we must re

member that women no longer simply live in the home and understand the business of the home. They are found in our mills and in our factories, as I say, working for long hours. They are found in our office buildings, in our stores, and in all the various walks of life, earning their daily bread. They are engaged in all kinds of charitable work, and understand many problems of charity and education, many of the questions which we may group under the head of social welfare, they understand those problems quite as clearly as do the men, and are more interested in them.

"Recently the Chamber of Deputies in France appointed a commission to study this question. They went about; but one of the discoveries they made in Paris, and reported, is most interesting. They found in the great capital city of France there were actually more women than men engaged in gainful occupations. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts it is said that 500,000 women are working for their living. Now, my friends, the fact is that woman is no longer simply confined to the home, as I have said, and understands only the home in the narrow sense of the word. We need her vote as mother and home-maker, but I believe she has the right to participate, she has a duty, to participate in the settlement of these questions affecting herself and the home and children.

"The fact is that to-day we have given women education and the right to go where they will in such occupations as they please. The sphere of woman to-day is what she is able to make it, by her own ability and intelligence, and she has the right, it seems to me, to the same freedom that men have, to make her life what she chooses her life to be. Now, therefore, I feel that having granted all this to the women, having educated them, having so changed the laws that she is the equal in the household to the man, and having given her this experience, we have fitted her to cast the ballot, and it is utterly impossible for us now to deny her the ballot, equally with men, equally participating in the government.

DIFFERENCES JUSTIFY REPRESENTATION

"I know it will be said, and it lies in the back of your minds, too, that after all women are different from men, that they look at life from a different point of view; that they look at these questions from a different point of view from which men look at them. Very true, I admit it. They do; but is that really an argument against woman. suffrage? I take it that it is the very strongest argument for woman suffrage, the strongest argument for democracy itself. Working men do not look at questions from the same point of view as their employers. Farmers do not look at questions from the same point of view as manufacturers and those living in cities. So we find that as different groups of citizens look at questions from a different point of view, it is essential that all those points of view, if justice is to be done, should be represented. Therefore, in so far as woman's point