Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/96

84 under the spell of his superior attraction your vision of domestic quiet and order vanishes. The same fortune befalls female clerks in stores, in banks, and in public offices, and teachers in all schools, public and private. Almost invariably we lose our 'clerks, our teachers, when they become wives; almost invariably we do not lose our clerks and teachers when they become husbands, never except when they pass to a higher grade of service or to partnership or an independent business.

 Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below and saints above.

Let us suppose that in this congressional district, under the régime of full woman suffrage, some brilliant, educated, and accomplished lady, whose eloquence on the stump in a political campaign had electrified thousands of listening voters, had been nominated and elected as representative to Congress. Among the auditors whom she had fascinated might not one every-way eligible man have been bold enough to make confession of a personal attachment before the eloquent pleadings of which this young Jeanne d'Arc of politics should find herself compelled to forego her ambition for public distinction, and take upon herself the humbler but sweeter duty of consecration to a single man? The same accident would befall everywhere. Only the intelligent and agreeable women would be popular, and only the popular women would be candidates and elected. To put them in office would of itself expose them everywhere to appropriation by men brought by the occasions of public business into the circle of their acquaintance. I dare not pursue further this dangerous argument.

Will the female suffragists consent to a self-denying ordinance that shall exclude from office? I apprehend not. That is the very thing they will not listen to with patience. They have avowed that what they demand is that women shall have an opportunity to try their hands at law-making and law-administering, with a view of bettering both. They wish to vote in order that they may vote for each other, and no way has been proposed or seems practicable of making women electors that will not also make them potentially the elected.

As soon as the naturalized Irishmen in Portland became an appreciable element of the voting population, they began to be put upon the electoral tickets for municipal and State offices by both parties. In Boston and in New York, where they compose a majority of the voters, they get the majority of candidacies for places under the city government. When by a heroic effort we lifted a million of ignorant and degraded slaves to the rank of citizens and electors, the immediate result was negro justices of