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MRS. A. J. GEORGE

Alice N. George, widow of Dr. Andrew J. George; graduated from Wellesley in 1887; is President of the Brookline Branch of the Ramabai Association; American Representative of the National Trust (English) for the Preservation of Historic Places; a director of the College Club; a member of the Research Committee of the Educational and Industrial Union, of the Welfare Department of the National Civic Federation of the Woman's Trade Union League, of the American Society for Labor Legislation, etc., etc.

J. A. H.

Woman suffrage must ultimately fail. It is based upon a fallacy, and no fallacy has ever made a permanent conquest over mankind.

The fallacy of woman suffrage lies in the belief that there is in our social order a definite sex division of interests, and that the security of woman's interests depends upon her possession of the elective franchise.

"The history of mankind," declared the founders of the suffrage movement, "is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having as the indirect object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." "Man has endeavored in every way he could," continues this arraignment of the fathers, husbands, and sons of these self-styled Mothers of the Revolution, "to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life."

On this false foundation was built the votes-for-women temple. How shall it endure? The sexes do not stand in the position of master and slave, of tyrant and victim. In a healthy state of society there is no rivalry between men and women; they were created different, and in the economy of life have different duties, but their interests are the common interests of humanity. Women are not a class, they are a sex; and the women of every social group are represented in a well-ordered government, automatically and inevitably, by the men of that group. It would be a fatal day for the race when women could obtain their rights only by a victory wrested at the polls from reluctant men. These truths are elementary and self-evident, yet all are negatived by the votes-for-women movement.

That the vote is not an inalienable right is affirmed by Supreme Court decisions, the practice of nations, and the dictates of common sense. No state can enfranchise all its citizens, and since the stability of government rests ultimately upon a relentless enforcement of law, the maintenance of a sound fiscal policy, and such adjustment of the delicate interweaving of international relations as makes for peace and prosperity, it is right that the state should place the responsibility of government upon those who are best equipped to perform its manifold duties.

Woman's citizenship is as real as man's, and no reflection upon her abilities is involved in the assertion that woman is not fitted for government either by nature or by contact in daily experience with affairs akin to government. She is weak along the lines where the lawmaker must be strong. In all departments where the law is to be applied and enforced, woman's nature forbids her entrance. The casting of a ballot is the last step in a long process of political organization; it is the signing of a contract to undertake vast responsibilities, since it is the following of the ballot to its conclusion which makes the body politic sound. Otherwise political power without political responsibility threatens disaster to all.

Thus far we have made a few crude experiments in double suffrage, but nowhere has equal suffrage been tried. Equal suffrage implies a fair field with favor to none—a field where woman, stripped of legal and civil advantages, must take her place as man's rival in the struggle for existence; for, in the long run, woman cannot have equal rights and retain special privileges. If the average woman is to be a voter, she must accept jury service and aid in the protection of life and property. When the mob threatens, she must not shield herself behind her equal in government. She must relinquish her rights and exemptions under the law and in civil life, if she is to take her place as a responsible elector and compete with man as the provider and governor of the race. Such equality would be a brutal and retrogressive view of woman's rights. It is impossible, and here we have the unanswerable answer to woman suffrage theories.

No question of superiority or equality is involved in the opposition to votes for women. The test of woman's worth is her ability to solve the problems and do the work she must face as a woman if the race is not to deteriorate and civilization perish. The woman's suffrage movement is an imitation-of-man movement, and as such merits the condemnation of every normal man and woman.

Doubtless we can live through a good deal of confusion, but it is not on any lines of functional unfitness that life is to be fulfilled. Woman must choose with discrimination those channels of activity wherein "what she most highly values may be won." Are these values in the department of government or in the equally essential departments of education, society, and religion?

The attempt to interpret woman's service to the state in terms of political activity is a false appraisal of the contribution she has always made to the general welfare. All this agitation for the ballot diverts attention from the only source from which permanent relief can come, and fastens it upon the ballot box. It is by physical, intellectual, and moral education that our citizenship is gradually improved, and here woman's opportunities are supreme. If women are not efficient in their own dominion, then in the name of common sense let them be trained for efficiency in that dominion and not diffuse their energies by dragging them through the devious paths of political activity.

Equal suffrage is clearly impossible; double suffrage, tried under most favorable conditions in sparsely settled western states has made no original contribution to the problem of sound government. On the other side of the ledger we find that the enfranchisement of women has increased taxes, added greatly to the menace of an indifferent electorate, and enlarged the bulk of unenforced and unenforceable laws.

Why does double suffrage, with its train of proved evils and its false appraisal of woman's contribution to the general welfare, come knocking at our doors? Not a natural right; a failure wherever tried; demanded by a small minority in defiance of all principles of true democracy; what excuse is there for it?

The confusion of social and personal rights with political, the substitution of emotionalism for investigation and knowledge, the mania for uplift by legislation, have widely advertised the suffrage propaganda. The reforms for which the founders of the suffrage movement declared women needed the vote have all been accomplished by the votes of men. The vote has been withheld through the indifference and opposition of women, for this is the only woman's movement which has been met by the organized opposition of women.

Suffragists still demand the vote. Why? Perhaps the answer is found in the cry of the younger suffragists: "We ask the vote as a means to an end—that end being a complete social revolution!" When we realize that this social revolution involves the economic, social, and sexual independence of women, we know that Gladstone had the prophet's vision when he called woman suffrage a "revolutionary" doctrine.

Woman suffrage is the political phase of feminism; the whole sweep of the relation of the sexes must be revised if the woman's vote is to mean anything more than two people doing what one does now. Merely to duplicate the present vote is unsound economy. To re-enforce those who clamor for individual rights is to strike at the family as the self-governing unit upon which the state is built.

This is not a question of what some women want or do not want—it is solely a question of how the average woman shall best contribute her part to the general welfare. Anti-suffragists contend that the average woman can serve best by remaining a non-partisan and working for the common good outside the realms of political strife. To prove this contention they point to what women have done without the ballot and what they have failed to do with it.

Anti-suffragists are optimists. They are concerned at the attempt of an organized, aggressive, well financed minority to force its will upon the majority of women through a false interpretation of representative democracy; but they know that a movement so false in its conception, so false in its economy, so false in its reflections upon men and its estimate of women, so utterly unnecessary and unnatural, cannot achieve a permanent success.