Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/168

136 that body of women, would tend to elevate the standard of the representative both for ability and manly character. Macaulay in one of his speeches on the Reform bill refers to the quality of the men who had for half a century been members for the five most numerous constituencies in England—Westminster, Southwark, Liverpool, Bristol and Norwich. Among them were Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Romilly, Windham, Tierney, Canning, Huskisson. Eight of the nine greatest men who had sat in parliament for forty years sat for the five largest represented towns. To increase the numbers of constituencies diminishes the opportunity for corruption. Size is itself a conservative force in a republic. As a permanent general rule the people will desire their own best interest. Disturbing forces, evil and selfish passions, personal ambitions, are necessarily restricted in their operation. The larger the field of operation, the more likely are such influences to neutralize each other.

The objection of inexperience in public affairs applies, of course, alike to every voter when he first votes. If it be valid, it would have prevented any extension of the suffrage, and would exclude from the franchise a very large number of masculine voters of all ages.

That women are quite generally dependent on the other sex is true. So it is true that men are quite generally dependent on the other sex. It is impossible so to measure this dependence as to declare that man is more dependent on woman or woman upon man. It is by no means true that the dependence of either on the other affects the right to the suffrage.

Capacity for military duty has no connection with capacity for suffrage. The former is wholly physical. It will scarcely be proposed to disfranchise men who are unfit to be soldiers by reason of age or bodily infirmity. The suggestion that the country may be plunged into wars by a majority of women who are secure from military dangers is not founded in experience. Men of the military profession, and men of the military age are commonly quite as eager for war as non-combatants, and will hereafter be quite as indifferent to its risks and hardships as their mothers and wives.

The argument that women are without the power to enforce the laws which their numerical strength may enable them to make, proceeds from the supposition that it is probable that all the women will range themselves upon one side in politics and all the men on the other. Such supposition flatly contradicts the other arguments drawn from the dependence of women and from their alleged unwillingness to assume political burdens. So men over fifty years of age are without the power to enforce obedience to laws against which the remainder of the voters forcibly rebel. It is not physical power alone, but power aided by the respect for law of the people, on which laws depend for their enforcement.

The sixth, eighth and ninth reasons of the committee are the same proposition differently stated. It is that a share in the government of the country is a burden, and one which, in the judgment of a majority of the women of the country, they ought not to be required to assume. If any citizen deem the exercise of this franchise a burden and not a privilege, such person is under no constraint to exercise it. But if it be a birthright, then it is obvious that no other power than that of the indivi-