Page:"Homo Sum" being a letter to an anti-suffragist from an anthropologist.djvu/8

4 especially if I can at the same time learn in detail the avenues by which that conviction has been approached. This is why I venture on the egotism of recounting my own experiences.

In my own case, the avenues of approach to what I believe to be truth have been circuitous and through regions apparently remote and subjects irrelevant. I have been investigating lately the origins of religion among primitive peoples, and this has led me to observe the customs of South Sea Islanders and North American Indians. In order to understand these customs, I have been further driven to acquire the elements of psychology and sociology. Without intentionally thinking about the suffrage question at all, while my thoughts have been consciously engaged with these multifarious topics, dimly at first, and clearly of late, the conviction has grown up in my mind that I ought to be a Suffragist. I can with perfect candour say that for weeks and even months I have tried to shirk the formulation of my own views and the expression of them to you, partly because I feared their expression might cause either boredom or irritation, still more because I wanted to do other things. But the subject, fermenting in my mind, has left me no peace, and irresistibly I have felt compelled to embark on this letter.

Your position is, I think, what mine once was: that a woman is better without a vote. The possession and use of a vote—of political power—is somehow "unwomanly," With this position in one sense I still heartily agree, but I must add a hasty and perhaps unexpected corollary.