Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/748

728 remains what it is. Men may grant women anything hut the right to rule them, but there they draw the line. Is it not on questions of rule that the wars of men are mostly fought, and will men yield to the weak what they only surrender to irresistible force? In the settlement of all questions by force, women are only in the way.

The effect of sexual discord is bad on both sexes, but has its greatest influence for evil through woman. While it does not remove her frailties it suppresses her distinctively feminine virtues. This suppression, continued for a few generations, must end in their greater or less abolition. The lower instincts would remain, the flowers which blossom on that stem would wither. No matter what their intellectuality might be, such women would produce a race of moral barbarians, which would perish ultimately through intestine strife. The highest interests and pleasures of the male man are bound up in the effective preservation of the domestic affections of his partner. Where these traits are weak, he should use every effort to develop them by giving them healthy exercise. As in all evolution, disuse ultimately ends in atrophy, and the atrophy of the affections in woman is a disaster in direct proportion to its extent. It may be replied again that woman suffrage carries with it no such probable result. But I believe that it does, unless the relations of the sexes are to be reversed. But it will be difficult to reduce the male man to the condition of the drone-bee (although some men seem willing to fill that rôle); or of the male spider, who is first a husband and then a meal for his spouse. We have gone too far in the opposite direction for that. It will be easier to produce a reversion to barbarism in both sexes by the loss of their mutual mental hyperæsthesia.

If women would gain anything with the suffrage that they can not gain without it, one argument would exist in its favor to the many against it; but the cause of women has made great progress without it, and will, I hope, continue to do so. Even in the matter of obtaining greater facilities for divorce from drunken or insane or brutal husbands than now exist in many States of the Union, they can compel progress by agitation. A woman's society, with this reform as its object, would obtain definite results. The supposition that woman would improve the price of her labor by legislation is not more reasonable than it is in the case of men, who have to yield to the inexorable law of supply and demand.

When we consider the losses that women would sustain with the suffrage carried into effect bona fide, the reasons in its favor dwindle out of sight. The first effect would be to render marriage more undesirable to women than it is now. A premium would be at once set on unmarried life for women, and the hetæra would become a more important person to herself and to