Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/717

Rh to the belief that the party which is laboring to convert women into voters is threatening serious injury to the state both in a political and in a social aspect. Her argument is a very comprehensive one, as a glance at the titles of her chapters will show; and at every point she arrives at the same conclusion, namely, that the woman suffragists have raised false issues, put forward false pretensions, and generally gone about as far wrong as it was possible to do. We believe—having read the book attentively—that it is destined to have a potent influence in the settlement of the question with which it deals.

The first thing that strikes us in connection with Mrs. Johnson's argument is the high ground she takes on woman's behalf. If she does not claim the suffrage for women it is not that she deems them incapable of forming correct judgments on political questions; not because she recognizes any mental inferiority whatsoever on their part, but because she believes that they constitute that portion of society in whose interest chiefly all laws are enacted and the whole machinery of politics is kept going. We are hardly mistaken in saying that she considers that in the development and perfection of woman the life of society finds its highest significance. The poet Clough had the same thought when he said that men might well

The advocates of the suffrage for women will therefore have to attack Mrs. Johnson on other grounds than her depreciation of the female sex. It is they, according to Mrs. Johnson, who depreciate the female sex in asking woman to enter upon a struggle for a position actually inferior to that which she already possesses, a position in which, instead of assuming, as she now may, that laws are made especially for her benefit, she will proceed on the contrary supposition that she can not get common justice unless she wrenches it from man at the polling booth.

Our own view of the general question has been more than once stated in these columns; and it is with pleasure we note how close the agreement is between what we have said, writing from a masculine standpoint, and the conclusions of the book before us, written by a woman jealous for the honor of her sex and instinct with true feminine feeling. Mrs. Johnson perceives, as we do, that law-making means nothing else than the laying down of rules of conduct which are to be enforced, if necessary, by physical compulsion, and that unless we want women to take up cudgels in the most literal sense for the enforcement of laws we should not ask them to take part in making them. Those who vote for laws should not only be possible combatants, but should be individuals whose natures would not be essentially injured by actual physical conflict. Women are possible combatants, as the suffragists sometimes remind us, but the essential nature of woman would be injured by participation in physical conflicts. Why can we tolerate prize fights between men, while prize fights between women fill us with horror and disgust? Is it not because Nature itself tells us that whatever woman's physical strength may be—and suffragists sometimes remark with their customary acuteness that some women are stronger than some men—it is not meant to be exerted in delivering blows? But if a prize fight between two women is horrible to think of, what language could be applied to a prize fight between a woman and a man, however evenly