Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/429

Rh would thus be made, which the blind could decipher by feeling.

It is true, the printing would be reversed, but in spite of this the type-writer for the blind would have advantages which, it seems to me, no other instrument of the kind yet invented possesses.

[Ordinary type-writers are used by hundreds of blind operators for writing to seeing persons. A blind person, having once learned the arrangement of the keys, has little difficulty in operating the instrument. This is one of the uses proposed for it by the inventor of the earliest form of typewriter, Charles Thurber, in 1843, and one of his machines is now in existence which had originally raised letters on the keys to facilitate such use. In order that the printing shall be legible to the blind, of course some mode of pricking or embossing the paper would have to be employed, and the reversing of the print, to which our correspondent alludes, could easily be obviated by reversing the type.—]

Editor Popular Science Monthly:

Prof. Cope's "Relation of the Sexes to Government," in the October number of the "Monthly," he makes intellectual inferiority, physical inability, and the social position of woman the practical objections to granting her the "privilege" of suffrage, and favors its restriction rather than an extension.

But even if men are on the whole superior to women, the difference is not so great but that, if the same restrictive process were applied to women and men, a considerable minority of the women would fulfill the conditions which a not very large majority of the men could fulfill. Although any system of suffrage can only be an approximation to what might be best, it is a poor approximation indeed that will shut out a huge minority of one sex because the majority of that sex fail to fulfill the qualifications for suffrage. That is majority-rule with a vengeance.

It is declared that "woman suffrage becomes government by women alone on every occasion where a measure is carried by the aid of woman's votes." Then government by a successful party, whose candidate is elected by a majority of one thousand in a "deciding State," becomes government by five hundred and one men; and government everywhere becomes government by the smallest possible majority of the majority by which a party elects its candidate. What becomes of popular government? It is further declared that, if women vote with their husbands, suffrage becomes a farce. It is a very plain social fact that men who associate much come to think alike, especially on subjects that are much thought upon. Like teacher, like student; like father, like son. Politics runs in families almost as much as features do. If all who acquire their political leanings from their constant associates shall not vote, a very large majority of the sons of the country must be disfranchised, and in a generation there will be no voters at all. And if the women of the land, by exercising suffrage, run the danger of becoming the mothers of a "generation of moral barbarians," are the fathers of the race so entirely different in quality from the mothers that the transmission of a very large amount of barbarism might not be prevented by a wholesale restriction of the suffrage?

Physical inability to execute the laws when they are made, and to defend them in a military capacity, is made a principal objection to the granting of suffrage to women. "This consideration alone, it appears to me, puts the propriety of female suffrage out of the question." But only a small proportion of men are willing to be executors of the law, as policemen and sheriffs; and, as for the judicial positions, an even smaller proportion is fitted to fill them. Restriction of the suffrage would be a good thing; let it be applied under the principle of immunity from military service, and who would be disfranchised? War demands able-bodied men; only men that are perfectly regular in form and sound in health can be soldiers. If immunity from service is to form the boundary-line of suffrage, all the rest, a vast number, would be shut out. This excluded list would include perhaps the best class of voters the nation has—the older men—because they are exempt from military duty. But I am sure the professor himself would be unwilling to begin restriction under the principle he has enunciated, and reduce the elders of the nation to the condition of Gulliver's Luggnaggian struldbrugs.