Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/457

Rh He has given us the means of judging of her speculative powers, and even they, it is evident, were not extraordinarily high.

That there are women eminently capable of understanding and discussing political questions nobody will deny. These will find a sphere in the press, through which many men exercise a power which makes it a matter of indifference whether they have a vote or not. But it by no means follows that it is expedient to put political power into the hands of the whole sex; much less that it is expedient to do so at a moment when it is morally certain that they would use their power to cancel a good deal of what has been done in their interest, as well as in that of their partners, by the efforts of the last two hundred years.

Some supporters of the movement flatter themselves that women would always vote for peace, and that female suffrage would consequently be a short method of ridding the world of war and standing armies. Such experience as we have hardly warrants this anticipation. Female sovereigns, as a rule, have not been eminently pacific. It would be difficult to find four contemporary male rulers who made more wars than Catherine II. of Russia, Maria Theresa, Madame de Pompadour (who ruled France in the name of her lover), and the Termagant, as Carlyle calls her, of Spain. It is widely believed that the late Empress of the French, inspired by her Jesuits, was a principal mover in the attack on Germany. Those who know the Southern States say that the women there are far more ready to renew the Civil War than the men. The most effective check on war is, to use the American phrase, that every one should do his own fighting. But this check cannot be applied to women, who will be comparatively irresponsible in voting for war. A woman, in fact, can never be a full citizen in countries where, as in Germany, it is part of a citizen's duty to bear arms.

Finally, it is said that there are certain specific grievances under which women labor, and which call for immediate redress, but of which redress cannot be had unless women are empowered to extort it from their husbands and brothers at the polls. Of course, if there is wrong, and wrong to half humanity, which cannot be righted in any other way, we must at once accept female suffrage, whatever perils it may entail.

In the United States the grievance of which most is heard is the tyrannical stringency of the marriage tie, which, it is alleged, gives a man property in a woman, and unduly interferes with the freedom and genuineness of affection. Some of the language used is more startling than this, and if reproduced might unfairly prejudice the case. But male Legislatures in the United States have already carried the liberty of divorce so far, that the next step would be the total abolition of marriage and the destruction of the family. The women themselves have now, it is said, begun to draw back. They have