Under woman suffrage we have better laws, better officers, better institutions, better morals, and a higher social condition in general, than could otherwise exist. Not one of the predicted evils, such as loss of native delicacy and disturbance of home relations, has followed in its train.
Later he said in a public address: "The great body of our women, and the best of them, have accepted the elective franchise as a precious boon and exercise it as a patriotic duty—in a word, after many years of happy experience, woman suffrage is so thoroughly rooted and established in the minds and hearts of the people that, among them all, no voice is ever uplifted in protest against or in question of it."
Governor Hale, who was next in this office, expressed himself repeatedly to the same effect.
Governor Warren, who succeeded Hale, said in a letter to Horace G. Wadlin, Esq., of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in 1885:
Our women consider much more carefully than our men the character of candidates, and both political parties have found themselves obliged to nominate their best men in order to obtain the support of the women. As a business man, as a city, county, and territorial officer, and now as Governor of Wyoming Territory, I have seen much of the workings of woman suffrage, but I have yet to hear of the first case of domestic discord growing out of it. Our women nearly all vote, and since in Wyoming as elsewhere the majority of women are good and not bad, the result is good and not evil.
Territorial Governors are appointed, not elected. As U. S. Senator, Mr. Warren has up to the present time (1902) repeatedly given similar testimony. In various chapters of the present volume may be found the strong approval of ex-U. S. Senator Joseph M. Carey.
Most of these Governors were Republicans. Hon. N. L. Andrews (Democrat), Speaker of the Wyoming House of Representatives, said in 1879:
I came to this Territory in the fall of 1871, with the strongest prejudice possible against woman suffrage. The more I have seen of it, the less my objections have been realized, and the more it has commended itself to my judgment and good opinion. Under all my observations it has worked well, and has been productive of much good. The women use the ballot with more independence and discrimination in regard to the qualifications of candidates than men do. If the ballot in the hand of woman compels political parties to place their best men in nomination, this, in and of itself, is a sufficient reason for sustaining woman suffrage.
Ex-Chief Justice Fisher, of Cheyenne, said in 1883:
I wish I could show the people who are so wonderfully exercised on the subject of female suffrage just how it works. The women watch the nominating conventions, and if the Republicans put a bad man on their ticket and the Democrats a good one, the Republican women do not hesitate a moment in scratching off the bad and substituting the good. It is just so with the Democratic women. I have seen the effects of female suffrage, and instead of being a means of encouragement to fraud and corruption, it tends greatly to purify elections and give better government.