reason she is
not subject to personal taxation. It is an error to suppose that voting
is a privilege, and taxation, ever and always, a burden. Both are
duties; and the privilege of the one and the burden of the other are
only incidental and subordinate. The human family is an aggregation of
families; and the family, not the man nor the woman, is the unit of the
state. The civil law assumes the existence of the family relation, and
its unity where it exists; hence taxation of the woman brings no revenue
to the state that might not have been secured by the taxation of the
man; and hence the exercise of the elective franchise by the woman
brings no additional political power; for, in the theory of the relation
to which there are, in fact, but few exceptions, there is in the
household but one political idea, and but one agent is needed for its
expression. The ballot is the judgment of the family; not of the man,
merely, nor of the woman, nor yet, indeed, always of both, even. The
first smile that the father receives from the child affects every
subsequent vote in municipal concerns, and likely enough also in
national affairs. From that moment forward, he judges constables,
selectmen, magistrates, aldermen, mayors, school-committees, and
councillors, with an altered judgment. The result of the election is not
the victory or defeat of the man alone; it is the triumph or prostration
of a principle or purpose with which the family is identified.

Is it said that there is occasionally, if not frequently, a divided
judgment in the household upon those questions that are decided by the
ballot? This must, of course, be granted as an exceptional condition of
domestic life; but, for the wisest reasons of public policy, whose
avoidance by the state would be treachery to humanity, the law universal
can recognize only the general condition of things. So, and for kindred
but not equally strong reasons, the elective franchise is exercised by
men without families, and denied to those women who by the dispensations
of Divine Providence are called to preside in homes where the father's
face is seen no more. But why, in the eye of the state, shall the man
stand as the head of the family, rather than the woman? Because God has
so ordained it; and no civil community has ever yet escaped from the
force of His decree in this respect. Those whose physical power defends
the nation, or tribe, or family, are naturally called upon to decide
what the m