On the other hand, why do those who have woman’s cause at heart lay such formal stress on the right of the ballot as a factor in her development? There can be no doubt that, if the majority of women wish to vote on questions involving property or political interests, they will be enabled to do so sooner or later. It is chiefly now the conviction in the minds of legislatures that a large number of the intelligent women of their communities do not desire to exercise the right of suffrage which keeps the bars down. Doubtless these bodies will yield one after another to the clamor of even a few, and the experiment will be tried. It may not come this year or the next, but many busy people are so certain that its coming is merely a question of time that they do not allow themselves to be drawn into the fury of the fray. When it comes, however, it will come as a universal privilege, and not with a social or property qualification. I mention this simply for the enlightenment of those amiable members of the sex to be enfranchised who go about sighing and simpering in the interest of drawing the line. That question was settled a century ago. The action taken may have been an error on the part of those who framed the laws, but it has been settled forever. There would be no more chance of the passage by the legislature of one of the United States of a statute giving the right of suffrage to a limited class of women than there would be of one prescribing that only the good-looking members of that sex should be allowed to marry.
Many people, who believe that woman should be denied no privilege enjoyed by man which she really desires to exercise, find much difficulty in regarding the right of suffrage as the vital end which it assumes in the minds of its advocates. One would suppose, by the clamor on the subject, that the ballot would enable her to change her spots in a twinkling, and to become an absolutely different creation. Lively imaginations do not hesitate to compare the proposed act of emancipation with the release of the colored race from bondage. We are appealed to by glowing rhetoric which celebrates the equity of the case and the moral significance of the impending victory. But the orators and triumphants stop short at the passage of the law and fail to tell us what is to come after. We are assured, indeed, that it will be all right, and that woman’s course after the Rubicon is crossed will be one grand march of progress to the music of the spheres; but, barring a pæan of this sort, we are given no light as to what she intends to do and become. She has stretched out her hand for the rattle and is determined to have it, but she does not appear to entertain any very definite ideas as to what she is going to do with it after she has it.