Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/205

 homes and children, less capable as housewives, less women in short, than the women of any other country. Their behaviour is as modest, their conversation as intelligent, their dress and manners as attractive, and their charm as patent as in the women of any one of the lands where women do not vote. Most certainly it has not been shown that women, by voting at intervals for Parliamentary candidates, have lost anything that goes to make up the special and distinctive charm of womanhood. Neither has their use of the vote been discovered to be harmful to any of the States where they vote. The opinion of the Australian Commonwealth has been quoted. Evidence in abundance is to hand from American statesmen of every degree of responsibility to prove that, so far as the suffrage States of America are concerned, there will be no going back to the old state of affairs when half their citizens were without the symbol of citizenship.

The legislation of all the countries where women vote reveals the fact that woman may be trusted to follow the line of political evolution. There have been no violent political changes, no embarrassing excesses, no promises of revolution, no extravagances, no flooding of the public offices with women, no wild rush into the realms of statecraft by women; neither the sudden overturning of old