Just take one thing which may seem small, but it’s of vast importance. Do you believe that if women had been voting as long as men that we should have allowed almost the most important people in the country to be underpaid? I mean the teachers. Any woman who has children or who deals with other people’s children realises what infinite patience, tact, love and long-suffering it takes to train and teach children properly. They also realise that they, the teachers and mothers of the nations, are forming the mind of the nation. And yet _all_ nations have left teachers in a rut for years and years, and allowed them to toil for a mere pittance. If women had been voters and organised voters, this would never have happened!
I urge the League of Women Voters not to disband and go into parties yet awhile. Naturally, you must vote with parties, and later on you will very likely get tied up like men into parties, but I don’t feel that the time is ripe. As women we must have organisation to educate ourselves, not on party lines, but on national lines. Raise the programme of all parties; that is what you are doing now. I beg you to keep on. The Democrats and Republicans will both try to catch you. Don’t let them catch you napping. Don’t become just fodder for political cannon. Form your programme and make all the parties adopt it. Begin in your home towns, begin at once. Get your politics straight. The only way to get cleaner and better politics is to come out and work. In Chicago, we hear just now of bombs. Well, I personally fear bombs in politics far less than I do apathy. If Chicago’s citizens are thinking first and foremost of money-making, then the politicians who represent them will be true to type. If they think first and foremost of higher things, they will get better politicians. You and I get pretty much what we deserve in life, be it political or otherwise.
I believe Chicago has a great heart as well as a great head. I always mistrust people who make the most noise. Beware of men and women who are out for themselves. That’s what keeps us all back--that awful self. Yet these people very often frighten politicians. I am told not to mention this or that subject in Chicago, especially the League of Nations. Now, if there is one city in America where one should talk of the League of Nations--surely it’s Chicago. Look at your population. It’s a City of Nations in itself. When you welcome other nationalities here, you want them to be good citizens. Do you believe that a man who forgets his mother is a good citizen? I don’t. So it is with men if they forget their motherland. The war is nearly over--we never want another war. Some of us feel that if we could get a league of all nations together, we would go a long way toward preventing another war. And we are quite right in thinking it. The present League of Nations, even without America, Germany or Russia, has prevented three minor wars already, besides doing many other things. Just to-day we read in the _Chicago Tribune_--“League Draws Silesian Thorn Out of Europe.” This brings to an end a dispute which nearly led to war between Germany, Poland, and other nations: