Recalling the action of her grandfather, she, better than some other women, might have realized the necessity of force for government. Her defiant spirit might well have descended from that ancestor who led four hundred men in Shays's Rebellion, when, in the State before whose tribunal she was speaking, he assisted in preventing court sessions, and swelled the ranks of the rioters who were decrying taxes and calling for fiat money, in a land that was impoverished and was struggling for a sound financial standing after a war that had been waged to guarantee the blessings of freedom to her and to her children.
As a matter of fact, many of those men whom Col. Higginson referred to as deemed unfit, did go into immediate training, and "muscular Christianity" would now present to the Surgeon-General a different showing. It was one of the surprising things, in a statistical way, to find that city-bred boys stood the marching and exposure of the Civil War campaigns better than their country brothers, and that the yard-stick turned into as effective a sword as the pruning-hook. Garrison, who maintained for so many years that men should not vote because the government was founded on force, had the grace not to speak on this phase of the question, but he said it was cruel that women should be disfranchised and classed with paupers, idiots, and criminals. Senator Hayes asked him if there was no "difference between a person who was disfranchised and one who never had been enfranchised?" and added that "he could see no argument for woman suffrage in the proposition that certain classes of men were not permitted to vote." Neither can I.
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 to be at once the weakest and the meanest of all. When the United States Government invited its woman citizens to share in making the Columbian Exposition the most wondrous pageant of any age, they responded from every town and hamlet by sending of their best. But the national Suffrage Association, as 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 States 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 defence. 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 must 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 authors of the "History" so often referred to, in answer to the claim that "government needs force behind it, and those who make the laws must execute them, and a woman could not be a sheriff or policeman," say: "Woman might not fill these offices as men do, but might far more effectively guard the morals of society and the sanitary conditions of our cities." A "moral guard" might be an excellent thing to ward off the ghosts in a country burying-ground, but would hardly prove effective against the riot of a Tammany mob on the night of an exciting election. It is absurd to speak in such fashion of work that is needed every hour. The crust of our civilization is very thin—how thin, the nation learned during the campaign just passed. Like a tempest from a clear sky, or one of their own cyclones, burst an influence from a portion of the West and South, that would have overturned the Government. Men struck fanatically and misguidedly at the integrity of the Supreme Court, at the power of the United States to hold jurisdiction over its own public affairs where they conflicted with State right, at the currency that gave the country ability to be honest at home and abroad, at the prosperity and honor of every citizen.
Fifteen years ago Suffrage leaders wrote in view of the wonderful advance of woman: "The broader demand for political rights has not commanded the thought its merits and dignity should have secured." If this was true, it had not been for lack of having the demand pressed home upon Congress and upon every State and Territorial legislature (save in most of the South), in season and out of season, by every device known to politics, as well as by a steady and impetuous flow of literature and petitions. How have these bodies answered this long appeal? It would take too much time and space, even were it of value, to follow the course of its ups and downs through all these years, but I mention first the fact that no State in New England has ever granted constitutional, or even municipal suffrage, although in some of the old thirteen it could have been done by an act of the legislature, a constitutional amendment not being needed. These are some of the figures for the past few years:
In Vermont, in 1892, the House passed a municipal suffrage bill—yeas 149, nays 83. In 1894 the House defeated a similar bill by a vote of 108 to 106, and refused reconsideration by a vote of 124 to 96. Thus a favorable majority of 66 in 1892 was changed to an adverse majority of 28 in 1894.
In Massachusetts, in 1894, the House passed a municipal suffrage bill by a vote of 119 to 107. In 1895 it defeated a similar bill, the vote standing, yeas 97, nays 137, on the question of carrying the bill to a third reading. In the same year an act was passed permitting all persons qualified to vote for school committee to express their opinion at the state election by voting "Yes" or "No," to the question: "Is it expedient that municipal suffrage be granted to women?" Not one woman in four voted in favor of the proposition, although if suffrage has any traditionary power outside of New York State, that power should have been felt in Massachusetts.
In Maine, in 1893, the Senate passed a municipal suffrage bill, which was defeated in the House. In 1895 the House passed a municipal suffrage bill, which was defeated in the Senate.
In New Hampshire, in 1895, the House refused a third reading to a municipal suffrage bill, by a vote of 185 to 108.
In Connecticut, in 1895, the Senate rejected a House municipal suffrage bill, while a presidential suffrage bill did not reach a vote. And in Rhode Island a proposition for a suffrage Constitutional amendment was referred to the next legislature.