smaller to
bar out some of the men. I couldn't think of very many reasons why the
average woman should want to mix in politics, but if she did wish so to
mix and mingle, I couldn't think of a single valid reason why she should
not have full permission, not as a privilege, not as a boon, but as a
common right. Nor could I bring myself to share, in any degree, the
apprehension of some of the anti-suffragists who held that giving women
votes would take many of them entirely out of the state of motherhood. I
cannot believe that all the children of the future are going to be born
on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Surely some of
them will be born on other dates. Indeed the only valid argument against
woman suffrage that I could think of was the conduct of some of the
women who have been for it.

To myself I often said:

"Certainly I favor giving them the vote. Seeing what a mess the members
of my own sex so often make of the job of trying to run the country, I
don't anticipate that the Republic will go upon the shoals immediately
after women begin voting and campaigning and running for office. At the
helm of the ship of state we've put some pretty sad steersman from time
to time. Better the hand that rocks the cradle than the hand that rocks
the boat. We men have let slip nearly all of the personal liberties for
which our fathers fought and bled--that is to say, fought the Britishers
and bled the Injuns. Ever since the Civil War we have been so dummed
busy telling the rest of the world how free we were that we failed to
safeguard that freedom of which we boasted.

"We commiserate the Englishman because he chooses to live under an
hereditary president called a king, while we are amply content to go on
living under an elected king called a president. We cannot understand
why he, a free citizen of the free-est country on earth, insists on
calling himself a subject; but we are reconciled to the fiction of
proclaiming ourselves citizens, while each day, more and more, we are
becoming subjects--the subjects of sumptuary legislation, the subjects
of statutes framed by bigoted or frightened lawgivers, the subjects of
arbitrary mandates and of arbitrary decrees, the subjects, the abject,
cringing subjects, of the servant classes, the police classes, the
labor classes, the capitalistic classes."

Naturally, as a Democrat I have felt these things with enhanced
bitterness when the Republicans were in office; ne