lthough it may prevent its
exercise.

Age as a qualification for suffrage is by no means to be confounded
with age as a qualification for service in war. Society has well
established the distinction, and that one has no relation whatever to
the other; the one having reference to physical prowess, while the
other relates only to the mental and moral state. This is shown by the
ages fixed by law for these qualifications, that of eighteen years
being fixed as the commencement of the term of presumed fitness
for military service, and forty-five years as the period of its
termination; while the age of presumed fitness for the suffrage, which
requires no physical superiority certainly, is set at twenty-one
years, when still greater strength of body has been attained than
at the period when liability to the dangers and hardships of war
commences; and there are at least three millions more male voters in
our country than of the population liable by law to the performance of
military duty. It is still further to be observed, that the right of
suffrage continues as long as the mind lasts, while ordinary liability
to military service ceases at a period when the physical powers,
though still strong, are beginning to wane. The truth is, that there
is no legal or natural connection between the right or liability to
fight and the right to vote.

The right to fight may be exercised voluntarily or the liability to
fight may be enforced by the community whenever there is an invasion
of right, and the extent to which the physical forces of society
may be called upon in self-defense or in justifiable revolution is
measured not by age or sex, but by necessity, and may go so far as to
call into the field old men and women and the last vestige of physical
force. It can not be claimed that woman has no right to vote because
she is not liable to fight, for she is so liable, and the freest
government on the face of the earth has the reserved power under the
call of necessity to place her in the forefront of battle itself, and
more than this, woman has the right, and often has exercised it, to go
there.

If any one could question the existence of this reserved power of
society to call the force of woman to the common defense, either in
the hospital or the field, it would be woman, who has been deprived of
participation in the government and in shaping the public policy which
has resulted in dire emergency to the state. But in all times, and