Answer:
Explanation:
The North American Review came out the other day for woman suffrage. That fact in itself does not
guarantee that women will get the suffrage right away, but it does attest that woman suffrage is an idea
on which some fairly thoughtful minds still dwell. Colonel Roosevelt is credited with having womansuffrage sentiments, and we guess Colonel Bryan also harbors them.
Woman suffrage is particularly good form just now because of the considerable stir about it in England.
Likely enough it will be realized in England before it is here. The population of England is mainly
English, and is not being enriched (or diluted) by an annual immigration of a million and a quarter of
newcomers from the outskirts of continental Europe. Woman suffrage in England would only mean
more of the same, but here it would mean both more of what we have got and of what we are getting.
The primary objection to woman suffrage is that it would add an enormous army of unqualified voters
to the huge mass of them that vote now. The primary argument in extenuation of it is that the standard
of qualification for voting is already so low that no possible influx of women voters could lower it. As it
is, our voters are an instrument to play upon. If the women voted it would be a bigger instrument, but
would it be in any important particular a different one? If the political achievements of the Women's
Christian Temperance Union in suppressing the army canteen are a fair example of what women might
be expected to do in politics, it will not profit the administration of government to have their direct
political power increased. It is likely, however, that the W. C. T. U. no more represents women in
general than the Prohibition party represents men in general. It is likely, too, that if women got the
suffrage, such organizations as the W. C. T. U. would lose in relative influence. Now they stand as lone
representatives of organized political womanhood. Their views are disseminated and their purposes are
pressed, but the views of women who dissent from them are not heard., If all women were politically
organized, the leadership of such special organizations would promptly be disputed and their influence
would probably diminish.
That has happened already in the case of the American suffragists. When it began to be feared that the organized action of
women who wanted to vote would force the suffrage upon the large majority of women who do not want to vote, the
antisuffrage women organized to prevent it. So far their opposition has usually been effective, so that for ten years past in the
older and more conservative States the woman-suffrage movement has retrograded.
