Female Suffrage | Page 9

day. But, taken in the plain meaning of those words, such fullness of suffrage has at the present hour no actual existence in any independent nation, or in any extensive province. It does not exist, as we have just seen, even among the men of America. And, owing to the conditions of human life, we may well believe that unrestricted fullness of manhood suffrage never can exist in any great nation for any length of time. In those States of the American Union which approach nearest to a practical manhood suffrage, unnaturalized foreigners, minors, and certain classes of criminals, are excluded from voting. And why so? What is the cause of this exclusion? Here are men by tens of thousands--men of widely different classes and conditions-- peremptorily deprived of a privilege asserted to be a positive inalienable right universal in its application. There is manifestly some reason for this apparently contradictory state of things. We know that reason to be the good of society. It is for the good of society that the suffrage is withheld from those classes of men. A certain fitness for the right use of the suffrage is therefore deemed necessary before granting it. A criminal, an unnaturalized foreigner, a minor, have not that fitness; consequently the suffrage is withheld from them. The worthy use of the vote is, then, a qualification not yet entirely overlooked by our legislators. The State has had, thus far, no scruples in withholding the suffrage even from men, whenever it has believed that the grant would prove injurious to the nation.
Here we have the whole question clearly defined. The good of society is the true object of all human government. To this principle suffrage itself is subordinate. It can never be more than a means looking to the attainment of good government, and not necessarily its corner- stone. Just so far is it wise and right. Move one step beyond that point, and instead of a benefit the suffrage may become a cruel injury. The governing power of our own country--the most free of all great nations--practically proclaims that it has no right to bestow the suffrage wherever its effects are likely to become injurious to the whole nation, by allotting different restrictions to the suffrage in every State of the Union. The right of suffrage is, therefore, most clearly not an absolutely inalienable right universal in its application. It has its limits. These limits are marked out by plain justice and common-sense. Women have thus far been excluded from the suffrage precisely on the same principles--from the conviction that to grant them this particular privilege would, in different ways, and especially by withdrawing them from higher and more urgent duties, and allotting to them other duties for which they are not so well fitted, become injurious to the nation, and, we add, ultimately injurious to themselves, also, as part of the nation. If it can be proved that this conviction is sound and just, founded on truth, the assumed inalienable right of suffrage, of which we have been hearing so much lately, vanishes into the "baseless fabric of a vision." If the right were indeed inalienable, it should be granted, without regard to consequences, as an act of abstract justice. But, happily for us, none but the very wildest theorists are prepared to take this view of the question of suffrage. The advocates of female suffrage must, therefore, abandon the claim of inalienable right. Such a claim can not logically be maintained for one moment in the face of existing facts. We proceed to the third point.
THIRDLY. THE ELEVATION OF THE ENTIRE SEX, THE GENERAL PURIFICATION OF POLITICS THROUGH THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN, AND THE CONSEQUENT ADVANCE OF THE WHOLE RACE. Such, we are told, must be the inevitable results of what is called the emancipation of woman, the entire independence of woman through the suffrage.
Here we find ourselves in a peculiar position. While considering the previous points of this question we have been guided by positive facts, clearly indisputable in their character. Actual, practical experience, with the manifold teachings at her command, has come to our aid. But we are now called upon, by the advocates of this novel doctrine, to change our course entirely. We are under orders to sail out into unknown seas, beneath skies unfamiliar, with small light from the stars, without chart, without pilot, the port to which we are bound being one as yet unvisited by mortal man--or woman! Heavy mist, and dark cloud, and threatening storm appear to us brooding over that doubtful sea. But something of prophetic vision is required of us. We are told that all perils which seem to threaten the first stages of our course are entirely illusive--that they will vanish as we approach--that we shall soon arrive