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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

“Then was there peace in Israel” and prosperity and success, as “Deborah ruled the people in righteousness for forty years.”

Women are more law-abiding than men. It is universally accepted that the class of people who best obey the laws are best fitted to make them. It is also stated that everything in a republic depends upon the obedience of the citizens to law. I visited the penitentiary of a state whose senator made this statement, and asked the warden how many prisoners he had. He replied, “Eight hundred and eighty-nine, of whom eight hundred and eighty are men and nine are women,” so that in the State of Kansas the women are a hundred times more law-abiding than the men. In the United States the same year there were sixty-eight thousand and five prisoners, of whom fifty-three thousand were men and only five thousand and five were women, showing that in the whole United States there were ten times as many men criminals as women.

It has been claimed that the small number of women prisoners is due to the fact that women have no part in politics, for in the thought of some people politics and prisons are synonymous terms. If, however, this statemen. were true of women, then where they are most in politics they would be most in prison We have but one state to which we can turn for statistics. At the close of the census in 1890 Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby, of Washington, consulted the statistics of crime, and learned to our great satis­faction that the only state in the Union in which there was not a woman criminal in jail or penitentiary was Wyoming, the state where women had voted for twenty-one years.

It has also been charged that on account of her emotional nature woman’s mental condition would be unsettled if she engaged in anything so exciting as public affairs. But Mrs. Colby also learned from the same source that the only state in which there was not an insane woman in public or private asylum was the State of Wyoming, where women have been voting for twenty-one years. She also learned that Wyom­ing was the only state in which but few men were insane—only three—and concludes that the exercise of suffrage makes women so peaceable to live with that very few men go insane. The same authority points to the fact that Wyoming is the only state in which during the last two decades the per cent of marriage has increased over the per cent of divorce.

If, then, in a republic the class which votes affects the government in the long run along the line of its nature, and women are more moral, more temperate, more religious, more peace-loving and more law-abiding than men, then if they were per­mitted to vote they would affect the government along these lines. It needs but a glance at the world’s history to show that these are the lines of weakness in republics, and that they have all died because of their immorality, licentiousness, intemperance, their disregard of their own laws, the violation of the statutes of God and by their warlike nature, and they can only become strong by the incoming of that class of people who are strong where they are weak. Then shall the voice of the people become the voice of God, and for the first time in history the voice of God shall be crystallized into the laws of a republic.