Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/745

Rh Between these extremes lies a territory in which each, case settles itself. But it will ever remain true that, for the normal woman, the home-life is both the easiest and the happiest.

When we come to the question of government, we reach a field in which the acts of men do not concern themselves alone, but exercise an important influence on the lives of others. Is woman by physical and mental constitution adapted to engage in the various duties and services required in the making and executing laws, and in the enterprises which nations find necessary in order to carry on their functions, and preserve themselves from internal and external enemies?

It must be here premised that the progress of civilization has thus far emphasized and not diminished the peculiarities of sex. The civilized woman is more refined, more tender, more intelligent, and more hysterical than her savage representative. Her form is more different from that of the male, and her face more expressive of her distinctive character. There is good reason to believe that this development has been due to the increased immunity from the severity of the "struggle for existence" which woman enjoys in civilized communities, and the greater opportunity thus given her to develop her own especial excellences.

The first thought that strikes us in considering the woman-suffrage movement is, that it is a proposition to engage women once more in that "struggle" from which civilization has enabled them in great measure to escape; and that its effect, if long continued and fairly tried, will be to check the development of woman as such, and to bring to bear on her influences of a kind different from those which have been hitherto active. And it becomes an impartial thinker to examine the question more closely, and see whether investigation bears out these impressions or not. We inquire, then, in the first place, is government a function adapted to the female character, or within the scope of her natural powers? We then endeavor to discover whether her occupation of this field of action is calculated to promote the mutual sex interest which has been referred to above, and thus to subserve the natural evolution of humanity.

In endeavoring to answer the first question we are at once met by the undoubted fact that woman is physically incapable of carrying into execution any law she may enact. She can not, therefore, be called on to serve in any executive capacity where law is to be executed on adults. Now, service in the support of laws enacted by those who "rule by the consent of the governed" is a sine qua non of the right to elect governors. It is a common necessity to which all of the male sex are, during most of their lives, liable to be called on to sustain. This consideration alone, it appears to me, puts the propriety of female suffrage out of the