The association as such has no view on this subject. Like every other national association it is made up of persons of all shades of opinion on the race question and on all other questions except those relating to its particular object. The northern and western members hold the views on the race question that are customary in their sections; the southern members hold the views that are customary in the South. The doctrine of State's rights is recognized in the national body and each auxiliary State association arranges its own affairs in accordance with its own ideas and in harmony with the customs of its own section. Individual members in addresses made outside of the National Association are of course free to express their views on all sorts of extraneous questions but they speak for themselves as individuals and not for the association. . . .
The National American Woman Suffrage Association is seeking to do away with the requirement of a sex qualification for suffrage. What other qualifications shall be asked for it leaves to each State. The southern women most active in it have always in their own State emphasized the fact that granting suffrage to women who can read and write and who pay taxes would insure white supremacy without resorting to any methods of doubtful constitutionality. The Louisiana association asks for the ballot for educated and taxpaying women only and its officers believe that in this lies "the only permanent and honorable solution of the race question." . . .
The suffrage associations of the northern and western States a for the ballot for all women, though Maine and several other States have lately asked for it with an educational or tax qualification. To advise southern women to beware of lending "sympathy or support" to the National Association because its auxiliary societies in the northern States hold the usual views of northerners on the color question is as irrelevant as to advise them to beware of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union because in the northern and western States it draws no color line; or to beware of the General Federation of Women's Clubs because the State Federations of the North and West do not draw it; or to beware of Christianity because the churches in the North and West do not draw it. . . .