Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/99

 every qualified citizen constitutes the true political status of the people in a republic.

The right of suffrage is simply the right to govern one's self. Every human being is born into the world with this right, and the desire to exercise it comes naturally with the feeling of life's responsibilities. Those only who are capable of appreciating this dignity, can measure the extent to which women are defrauded, and they only can measure the loss to the councils of the nation of the wisdom of representative women. They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience.

It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts. If woman naturally has no will, no self-assertion, no opinions of her own, what means the terrible persecution of the sex under all forms of religious fanaticism, culminating in witchcraft in which scarce one wizard to a thousand witches was sacrificed? So powerful and merciless has been the struggle to dominate the feminine element in humanity, that we may well wonder at the steady, determined resistance maintained by woman through the centuries. To every step of progress which she has made from slavery to the partial freedom she now enjoys, the Church and the State alike have made the most cruel opposition, and yet, under all circumstances she has shown her love of individual freedom, her desire for self-government, while her achievements in practical affairs and her courage in the great emergencies of life have vindicated her capacity to exercise this right.

The right of suffrage i in a republic means self-government, and self-government means education, development, self-reliance, independence, courage in the hour of danger. That women may attain these virtues we demand the exercise of this right. Not that we suppose we should at once be transformed into a higher order of beings with all the elements of sovereignty, wisdom, goodness and power full-fledged, but because the exercise of the suffrage is the primary school in which the citizen learns how to use the ballot as a weapon of defense; it is the open sesame to the land of freedom and equality. The ballot is the scepter of power in the hand of every citizen. Woman can never have an equal chance with man in the struggle of life until she too wields this power. So long as women have no voice in the Government under which they live they will be an ostracised class, and invidious distinctions will be made against them in the world of work. Thrown on their own resources they have all the hardships that men have to encounter in earning their daily bread, with the added disabilities which grow out of disfranchisement. Men of the republic, why make life harder for your daughters by these artificial distinctions? Surely, if governments were made to protect the weak against the strong, they are in greater need than your stalwart sons of every political right which can give them 'protection, dignity and power.