Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/718

702 they might be matched? Surely "woman's rights" stop short of that. If voting meant merely the collecting of opinions, no one would dream of refusing the votes of women; but so long as it means the determining and arraying of forces, which must in the last resort be physical forces, something else than an instinctive desire to tyrannize may well inspire the men who do not wish women to vote. As to the women who do not wish to vote, the simple answer they have to give to inquiring committee women is that they know "a more excellent way."

If the book to which we are referring has a fault it is that it is too argumentative. The author seems to have made up her mind to achieve a victory at every point, and has consequently entered on one or two discussions which might perhaps have been advantageously omitted. We doubt whether it was very necessary to prove that aristocratic institutions are more favorable to the political prominence of women than democratic ones. It is enough to prove, as we think the author has done, that there are reasons for believing that the participation of women in the suffrage to-day, far from improving the constitution of society, would tend to impair it. It was useful, however, to insist that there is no connection between the democratic theory of society and the extension of the suffrage to women. It would be an insult to the female sex to maintain that, in the progressive lowering of the conditions for the exercise of the electoral franchise, women ought to be taken in; or even that, because the franchise is very widely bestowed, women ought to possess it. These unflattering arguments are more or less used by the advocates of woman suffrage; but those who have a truer sense of the position and claims of women perceive that it never can be a question of conceding any right to her after men have obtained the same right, or even because they have obtained it; whatever is a woman's right belongs to her whether men have it or not.

How odiously in certain cases the suffrage party have stated their position is well shown by Mrs. Johnson in the following paragraph:

"The argument for woman suffrage which bases it upon a fancied grouping of women with the vile and brainless element in the country appears to me at once the weakest and the meanest of all. When the United States Government invited its women citizens to share in making the Columbian Exposition the most wondrous pageant of any age, the National Suffrage Association, at its official exhibit, gave a picture of the expressive face of Miss Willard surrounded by ideal heads of a pauper, an idiot, and a criminal, with a legend recording their belief that it was with these that American men placed American women. So false a picture must have taught the thoughtful gazers the opposite lesson from the one intended. It could have told them that the United Slates Government had at least guarded one trust with sacred care. The pauper was excluded from the ballot as not being worthy to share with freemen the honor of its defense. The unfortunate was excluded by an inscrutable decree of Providence. The criminal was excluded as being dangerous to society. The women were exempt from the ballot because it was for their special safety that a free ballot was to be exercised from which the pauper and the criminal were to be excluded. They were the ones who have given to social life its meaning and its moral, the ones who give to civic life its highest value."

The writer lays proper stress on the fact that the occasions are not so