“I must be honest. I must play the game squarely with you! I’m sorely tempted to cheat. But there’s too much at stake. You ask if you are not my equal? I answer promptly and honestly. I know that you are more—you are my superior. For this reason I would save you from the ballot. It is not a question of right, it is a question of hard and difficult duty. The ballot is not a right or a privilege. It is a solemn and dangerous duty. The ballot is force—physical force. It is a modern substitute for the bayonet—a device which has been used to prevent much civil strife. And yet man never votes away his right to a revolution. The Declaration of Independence embodies this fact—‘Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it—’ There you have the principle in full. Back of every ballot is a bayonet and the red blood of the man who wields it—”
“But we will substitute reason for force!”
“How, dear lady? Government is force—never was anything else—never can be until man is redeemed and this world is peopled by angels. Man is in the zoological period of his development. Scratch the most cultured man beneath the skin and you find the savage. Scratch the proudest nation of Europe beneath the skin and you find the elemental brute. I do not believe in forcing our mothers, our sisters, our wives and sweethearts into the blood-soaked mud of battle trenches. That work is the dangerous and difficult duty of man. So the ballot, on which peace or war depends, is his duty—not his right or privilege—”
“Give us the ballot and we will make war impossible,” Virginia broke in.
“How? If women vote with their men, their voting will mean nothing. We merely multiply the total by two. We do not change results. If women vote against the men on an issue of war or peace, will men submit to such a feminine decision? Certainly not. Force and force alone can decide the issue of force. Back of every ballot is a bayonet or there’s nothing back of it. The breath of revolution will drive such meaningless ballots as chaff before a whirlwind—”
“We’ll stop your blood-stained revolutions!” Virginia cried.
“All right. Do so and you stop the progress of humanity. The American Revolution was blood-stained. It gave us freedom. The Civil War was blood-stained. It freed this nation of the curse of slavery and sealed the Union for all time. There are good wars and bad wars. True war is the inevitable conflict between two irreconcilable moral principles. One is right—the other wrong. One must live—the other die. Wrong may triumph for a day. Right must win in the end or else the universe is ruled by the Devil, not by God. You cannot abolish war until the Devil is annihilated and God rules in the souls and lives of men and in their governments as well.”
For the moment the woman was swept from the moorings of her pet arguments. She quickly recovered.
“We are going to make America the moral and spiritual leader of mankind!” she cried with elation.
“Yes, I know. In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World—your poet’s dream as far removed from the beastly realities of life today as Heaven is from Hell—”