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duties or to sewing and mending for herself when her day's toil is over. If she is a wife and mother, she has her hands full with the house and the children. If she is a woman of affairs and charities, she has to keep a secretary or call in a stenographer to get through her letters and accounts. Most of the self-supporting women of my acquaintance do not want the ballot. They have no time to think about it. Most of the wives and mothers I know do not want to vote. They are too busy with other burdens. Most of the women of affairs I know do not want to vote. They are doing public work without it better than they could with it, and consider it a burden, not a benefit. The ballot is a duty, a responsibility; and most intelligent, active women to-day believe that it is man's duty and responsibility, and that they are not called to take it up in addition to their own share. The suffragists want the ballot individually. They have a perfect right to want it. They ask no leisure. And if it were only an individual question, then I should say heartily "Let them have it, as individuals, and let us refuse to take it, as individuals, and then the whole matter can be individually settled." But that is impossible, for there are two other aspects. The suffragists cannot get the vote without forcing it on all the rest of womankind in America; for America means unrestricted manhood suffrage, and an equal suffrage law would mean unrestricted womanhood suffrage, from the college girl to the immigrant woman who cannot read and the negro woman in the cotton-field, and from the leader of society down to the drunken woman in the police court. The individual aspect is only one of the three, and after all, the least important.

For no good woman lives to herself. She has always been part of a family as wife or sister or daughter from the time of Eve. The American home is the foundation of American strength and progress. And in the American home woman has her own place and her own duty to the family.

It is an axiom in physics that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. Woman, as an individual,

apart from all home ties, can easily enough get into a man's place. There are thousands of women in New York to-day— business women, professional women, working girls, who are almost like men in their daily activity. But nearly all these women marry and leave the man's place for the woman's, after a few years of business life. It is this fact which makes their wages lower than men's, and keeps them from being a highly skilled class. They go back into the home, and take up a woman's duties in the family. If they are wise women, they give up their work; they do not try to be in a man's place and a woman's too. But when they do make this foolish resolve to keep on working the home suffers. There are no children; or the children go untrained; housekeeping is given up for boarding; there is no family atmosphere. The woman's place is vacant-and in a family, that is the most important place of all. The woman, who might be a woman, is half a man instead.

The family demands from a woman her very best. Her highest interests, and her unceasing care, must be in home life, if her home is to be what it ought to be. Here is where the vote for woman comes in as a disturbing factor. The vote is part of man's work. Ballot-box, cartridge box, jury box, sentry box, all go together in his part of life. Woman cannot step in and take the responsibilities and duties of voting without assuming his place very largely. The vote is a symbol of government, and leads at once into the atmosphere of politics; to make herself an intelligent voter (and no other kind is wanted) a woman must study up the subjects on which she is to vote and cast her ballot with a personal knowledge of current politics in every detail. She must take it all from her husband, which means that he is thus given two votes instead of one, not equal suffrage, but a double suffrage for the man.

Home is meant to be a restful place, not agitated by the turmoil of outside struggles. It is man's place to support and defend the family, and so to administer the state that the family shall flourish in peace. He is the outside worker. Woman is the one whose place it is to bear and rear the

No one will deny that under the old Common Law woman suffered from many legal disabilities, but during the past fifty years these have not only been removed, but men have granted her legal rights and privileges which in many instances far exceed his own. Are the women who are demanding the suffrage ready to foreswear these privileges and immunities the day the ballot is placed in their hands? If so, will they not be striking rather a poor bargain by giving up more than they will get? Yet this seems to be a very fair proposition. Why should they retain all their rights and privileges if what they wish is to be man's equal? This question suggests another point. Will man continue to feel the same responsibility for woman's welfare if women have the ballot and can legislate for themselves? I fear not, and I believe that any change in our social order which tends to lessen man's responsibility toward woman is greatly to be regretted, for as woman's natural protector some of the noblest traits in a man's character are developed.

We grant there may still be minor instances in some states where the law discriminates against women, but there is sufficient evidence that "the subjection of woman" is a worn-out phrase, since she is not suffering from any gross injustice by reason of our so-called man-made laws. To force her into the political arena to fight her own battles when man has legislated so greatly in her favor, would seem like flying in the face of Providence.

Many earnest and sincere women declare they want to vote because they wish to take a hand in what they call municipal house-cleaning. More schools are needed, more parks and playgrounds; better tenements and cleaner streets. Give us the ballot, they argue, and all these things shall come to pass. Now these enthusiastic would-be house-cleaners fail to take one point into consideration, and a very important point it is. Under our form of government clean streets and model tenements are not voted for at the polls. In other words, men do not vote for measures, but for men whom they hope will carry out policies in which the voter believes. But a candidate for political office may be elected

in one section of the city to carry out certain measures, while in other quarters of the city other candidates are elected on other platforms, so when the different elements meet together on the Council Board or in the Legislature a compromise has to be effected or the political machinery is set in motion and the measure backed by the majority wins. Now the same situation would arise if women voted. All the women would not agree on any question of reform any more than men do, or if they all should happen to pull together for a measure, they might find the men arrayed on the other side, then we should have the disagreeable situation of a battle between the sexes, and a most unequal battle it would be. If the men were in the majority the women would lose their case, and if, on the other hand, the women were in the majority, they would still lose, for being noncombatants they could not force compliance to their wishes upon the minority. This point has been made clear by a New York lawyer who said, "The majority prevails because it is the majority, and could, if necessary, compel compliance with its wishes. To make possible a majority which a minority could safely defy, would be to overthrow the fundamental ideas of Republican government."

Under the present conditions of government woman as a non-partisan citizen is a power in any community, for untrammelled by party affiliations or obligations, she can go before any legislative committee or board of officials and urge the passage of any law or measure, and her recommendations will be considered on their merits, and not because she voted with this or that party at the last election. There are probably many in this audience this evening who could speak with authority on this subject and cite instances where they have been sponsors for some remedial measure which is now on the statute books of some city or state. The Equal guardianship law in New York is a case in point. That bill was introduced in the Legislature through the influence of the Woman's educational and industrial union in Buffalo. In speaking of this law the President of that Association said, "It passed both Houses without a dissenting

vote.

Circulars giving full information as to the desirability of the law and what we desired to accomplish were sent to every legislator, but there was no lobbying, and it was not even necessary for me to go to Albany." Is it expedient to take such power from woman and make her but a spoke in the wheel of political machinery?

Facts and Fallacies about Woman Suffrage.

It is a mistake to suppose that the great majority of women want to vote. They do not. In proof of which we state the following facts, which can easily be verified. We mention first the Massachusetts referendum of 1895, in which the women of that state, which was one of the earliest and strongest advocates of suffrage for women, were invited to put themselves on record, by the same means that men do, and under the same conditions, as to whether or not they desired the ballot. Less than four per cent of all the women of the state, of voting age, expressed such a desire, and that in spite of the earnest efforts of the suffragist agitators to call out a large affirmative vote. The proposition was ingloriously defeated all over the state, from Cape Cod to the Berkshire Hills, no measure having ever met with so overwhelming an overthrow in the state. Very naturally a proposition for a similar referendum in New York state in 1910 was strongly opposed by the suffragists.

School suffrage, now granted in about half our states, has been a lamentable failure, the woman vote averaging scarcely 2 per cent in any state. In the state of Ohio the number of women responding to the privilege has been so small, and the expense of registering and counting it has been so relatively large, that it has been seriously proposed to withdraw it altogether.

In Chicago, in the election of November 8, 1910, where women are allowed to vote for university trustees, in spite of the earnest efforts of the suffragists to bring out the full woman vote of the city, its population being counted by millions, 490 females registered, and of these but 243 voted.

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