ate calmly, if they could always be
controlled and act by judgment and not under passion, they might help
us to keep our institutions "eternal as the foundations of the
continent itself"; but the philosophers of history and the experience
of the ages past and present tell us in unanswerable arguments and
teach us by illustrations drawn from actual experience, that
governments have been overturned or endangered in periods of great
excitement by emotional suffrage and the speech and writings of
intolerant people....

Open that terrible page of the French Revolution and the days of
terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through
the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of
human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those
bloodthirsty mobs? Who shrieked loudest in that hurricane of passion?
Woman. Her picture upon the page of history is indelible. In the city
of Paris, in those ferocious mobs, the controlling agency, nay, not
agency but the controlling and principal power, came from those whom
God had intended to be the soft and gentle angels of mercy throughout
the world....

It has been said that if woman suffrage should become universal in the
United States, in times of great excitement arising out of sectional
questions or local conditions this country would be in danger of State
insurrections and seditions and that in less than a hundred years
revolutions would occur and our republican form of government would
come to an end. The United States should guard against emotional
suffrage. What we need is to put more logic and less feeling into
public affairs. This country has already extended suffrage beyond
reasonable bounds. Instead of enlarging it there are strong reasons
why it should be curtailed. It would have been better for wise and
safe government and the welfare of all the people if there had been
some reasonable standard of fitness for the ballot.

During the intense feeling and turbulent conditions growing out of the
Civil War, suffrage was so extended that many of the southern States
were turned over to the political control of those not sufficiently
informed to conduct good government. It has taken half-a-century of
strenuous effort to correct that mistake. The granting of universal
woman suffrage would greatly increase the existing evil and put it
beyond the possibility of correction except by an ultimate revolution.

We hear it frequently sta