Female Suffrage [10]
enjoying both the importance of the hour, the fun, and THE PAY. Fifty women, known to be thieves and prostitutes, will hold, at a moderate calculation, say two hundred votes. And, as women form the majority of the resident population in some States, that wretched element of society will, in fact, govern those States, or those who bribe them will do so. Massachusetts, very favorable to female suffrage now, will probably come round to the opinion of New Jersey in former days. Great will be the consumption of cheap ribbons, and laces, and artificial flowers, and feathers, and tinsel jewelry, in every town and village about election time, after emancipation is achieved. We are compelled to believe so, judging from our knowledge of human nature, and of the use already made of bribery at many elections. The demagogues will be more powerful than ever. Their work will be made easy for them. It seems, indeed, probable that under the new era our great elections shall become a sort of grand national gift concerns, of which the most active demagogues of all parties will be the managers. Not that women are more mercenary, or more unprincipled than men. God forbid! That would be saying too much. We entirely believe the reverse to be true. But the great mass of women can never be made to take a deep, a sincere, a discriminating, a lasting interest in the thousand political questions ever arising to be settled by the vote. They very soon weary of such questions. On great occasions they can work themselves up to a state of frenzied excitement over some one political question. At such times they can parade a degree of unreasoning prejudice, of passionate hatred, of blind fury, even beyond what man can boast of. But, in their natural condition, in everyday life, they do not take instinctively to politics as men do. Men are born politicians; just as they are born masons, and carpenters, and soldiers, and sailors. Not so women. Their thoughts and feelings are given to other matters. The current of their chosen avocations runs in another channel than that of politics--a channel generally quite out of sight of politics; it is an effort for them to turn from one to the other. With men, on the contrary, politics, either directly or indirectly, are closely, palpably, inevitably blended with their regular work in life. They give their attention unconsciously, spontaneously; to politics. Look at a family of children, half boys, half girls; the boys take instinctively to whips and guns and balls and bats and horses, to fighting and wrestling and riding; the girls fondle their dolls, beg for a needle and thread, play at housekeeping, at giving tea-parties, at nursing the sick baby, at teaching school. That difference lasts through life. Give your son, as he grows up, a gun and a vote; he will delight in both. Give your daughter, as she grows up, a gun and a vote, and, unless she be an exceptional woman, she will make a really good use of neither. Your son may be dull; but he will make a good soldier, and a very tolerable voter. Your daughter may be very clever; but she would certainly run away on the battle-held, and very probably draw a caricature on the election ticket. There is the making of an admirable wife and mother, and a valuable member of society, in that clever young woman. She is highly intelligent, thoroughly well educated, reads Greek and Latin, and has a wider range of knowledge and thought than ninety- nine in a hundred of the voters in the same district; but there is nothing of the politician in her nature. She would rather any day read a fine poem than the best political speech of the hour. What she does know of politics reaches her through that dull but worthy brother of hers. It is only occasionally that we meet women with an inherent bias for politics; and those are not, as a rule, the highest type of the sex--it is only occasionally that they are so. The interest most women feel in politics is secondary, factitious, engrafted on them by the men nearest to them. Women are not abortive men; they are a distinct creation. The eye and