"Give her the suffrage."
In one of his pamphlets in behalf of women's suffrage, Professor F. W. Newman of England, a man of widest culture and noblest sympathies, and always among the ablest and foremost in good works, remarks: "It is useless to reply that women have not political knowledge. Hitherto they have had little motive to acquire it. But how much of such knowledge have those male voters had, whom, for two hundred years past, candidates for the place of M. P. have made drunk in the tippling-houses? The arguments used against female suffrage simply show that there is nothing valid to be said. Women have, prima facie, the same right as men."
"Not by evading or profaning Nature."
In his recent "History of European Morals," Mr. Lecky, referring to the fact that the prevalent doctrine is, that the very highest interest of society is not to stimulate but to restrain multiplication, diminishing the number of marriages and of children, presents the following comments:—
"In consequence of this belief, and of the many factitious wants that accompany a luxurious civilization, a very large and increasing proportion of women are left to make their way in life without any male protector, and the difficulties they have to encounter through physical weakness have been most unnaturally and most fearfully aggravated by laws and customs which, resting on the old assumption that every woman should be a wife, habitually deprive them of the pecuniary and educational advantages of men, exclude them absolutely from very many of the employments in which they might earn a subsistence, encumber their course in others by a heartless ridicule or by a steady disapprobation, and consign, in consequence, many thousands to the most extreme and agonizing poverty, and perhaps a still larger number to the paths of vice.
"At the same time a momentous revolution, the effects of which can as yet be but imperfectly descried, has taken place in the chief spheres of female industry that remain. The progress of machinery has destroyed its domestic character. The distaff has fallen from the hand. The needle is being rapidly superseded, and the work which, from the days of Homer to the present century, was accomplished in the centre of the family, has been transferred to the crowded manufactory."
The necessity of those reforms which many noble women are now urging upon public attention is clearly set forth in eloquent facts like these.
"Is against nature."