She would not be allowed to shoot down innocent men whose opinions were opposed to her own, or to make widows and orphans.  She would be forbidden to stand behind cannon or to sink submarine torpedoes.  But it was within her reach to add to the sum total of peace and happiness.  She would, if she could get her Bureau of Children established, exercise a constructive influence completely in accord with the spirit of the time.  This being the case, she thought she ought to have the ballot.  It would make her stand up straighter, spiritually speaking.  It would give her the authority which would point her arguments; put a cap on the sheaf of her endeavors.  She wanted it precisely as a writer wants a period to complete a sentence.  It had a structural value, to use the term of an architect.  Without it her sentence was foolish, her building insecure.

“Why is it,” she demanded of the women of Lake Geneva when, in company with a veteran suffragist, she addressed them there, “that you grow weary in working for your town?  It is because you cannot demonstrate your meaning nor secure the continuation of your works by the ballot.  Your efforts are like pieces of metal which you cannot weld into useful form.  You toil for deserted children, indigent mothers, for hospitals and asylums, starting movements which, when perfected, are absorbed by the city.  What happens then to these benevolent enterprises?  They are placed in the hands of politicians and perfunctorily administered.  Your disinterested services are lost sight of; the politicians smile at the manner in which you have toiled and they have reaped.  You see sink into uselessness, institutions, which, in the compassionate hands of women, would be the promoters of good through the generations.  The people you would benefit are treated with that insolent arrogance which only a cheap man in office can assume.  Causes you have labored to establish, and which no one denies are benefits, are capriciously overthrown.  And there is one remedy and one only:  for you to cast your vote—­for you to have your say as you sit in your city council, on your county board, or in your state legislature and national congress.

“You may shrink from it; you may dread these new responsibilities; but strength and courage will come with your need.  You dare not turn aside from the road which opens before you, for to tread it is now the test of integrity.”

“Ought you to have said that?” inquired the older suffragist, afterward looking at Kate with earnest and burning eyes from her white spiritual face.  “I dare say I care much more about suffrage than you.  I have been interested in it since I was a child, and I am now no longer a young woman.  Yet I feel that integrity is not allied to this or that opinion.  It is a question of sincerity—­of steadfastness of purpose.”