Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/890

 Union under constitutions limiting suffrage to men. These precedents in our governmental history were never departed from until in recent years.

The greatest danger to the Republic of the United States today, as it always has been in governments where the people rule, is in an excitable and emotional suffrage. If the women of this country would always think coolly and deliberate calmly, if they could always be controlled and act by judgment and not under passion, they might help us to keep our institutions "eternal as the foundations of the continent itself"; but the philosophers of history and the experience of the ages past and present tell us in unanswerable arguments and teach us by illustrations drawn from actual experience, that governments have been overturned or endangered in periods of great excitement by emotional suffrage and the speech and writings of intolerant people. . ..

Open that terrible page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those bloodthirsty mobs? Who shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion? Woman. Her picture upon the page of history is indelible. In the city of Paris, in those ferocious mobs, the controlling agency, nay, not agency but the controlling and principal power, came from those whom God had intended to be the soft and gentle angels of mercy throughout the world. . ..

It has been said that if woman suffrage should become universal in the United States, in times of great excitement arising out of sectional questions or local conditions this country would be in danger of State insurrections and seditions and that in less than a hundred years revolutions would occur and our republican form of government would come to an end. The United States should guard against emotional suffrage. What we need is to put more logic and less feeling into public affairs. This country has already extended suffrage beyond reasonable bounds. Instead of enlarging it there are strong reasons why it should be curtailed. It would have been better for wise and safe government and the welfare of all the people if there had been some reasonable standard of fitness for the ballot.

During the intense feeling and turbulent conditions growing out of the Civil War, suffrage was so extended that many of the southern States were turned over to the political control of those not sufficiently informed to conduct good government. It has taken half-a-century of strenuous effort to correct that mistake. The granting of universal woman suffrage would greatly increase the existing evil and put it beyond the possibility of correction except by an ultimate revolution.

We hear it frequently stated that there is no argument against woman suffrage except sentiment. We can reply with equal force that there is no argument for woman suffrage except sentiment, and that often misguided and uninformed. Some suffragists insist that if woman suffrage became universal "it would set in motion the machinery of an earthly paradise." It was a woman of high standing in the literary and journalistic field who answered, "It is my opinion it would let loose the wheels of purgatory.". . . Suffragists frequently ask the question, "If we want to vote why should other people object?" If it is wrong they should not ask it any more than they should ask the privilege of committing a crime. If it is a wrong against the State every