WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 103, 3 May 1911, Page 2

WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

(From Our Own Correspondent). SAN FRANCISCO, 20th March. A glowing account of the benefits that woman suffrag& has conferred .upon New Zealand is given by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the American poetess. She quotes as her authority a maD she has met, but whom she does not name — "an educated man . . born and bred in New Zealand and knowing his subject thoroughly:" She cites his opinion that femalrt suffrage has been a brilliant success in New Zealand. "It has been a death blow to drunkenness. Men still drink — some of them too much — but alcoholism and its attendant evils have decreased 90 per cent, in New Zealand since women began to vote. We have proven that, while corrupt men may buy tho votes of sons and brothers and fathers of drunkards, the votes of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of a drunkard cannot be bought. Women have always been the greater sufferers from th© drink evil, and they havo proven powerful factors in this special reform movement. Our women are benefited intellectually by their privilege of voting. They are better comrades, wives, and mothers through their larger outlook en life. Far from neglecting their homes' and families, our women have developed higher ideals regarding these subjects." To this panegyric tho poetess adds her little note of comment : "Surely our American women who are so earnestly working for equal franchise should feel encouraged at such a report, coming directly from headquarters and from a man. All success to them and their cause."