The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-05-05
WOMEN IN LONDON AND MEN IN
PARIS
From the Pan Mau Gazette.

men to be passing resolutions In London in
favor of giving votes to women at parliament
ary elections at the same time that the National
Assembly was debating at Versailles and the
Central Committee governing in Paris. The
French National Assembly is the most striking
example which has ever been seen of voting
power divorced from physical or material
power. It represents more votes than any
representative body in the werld, but its
army declines to obey it, and half
the voters who sent delegates to it
are powerless to help it, since they
are at the mercy of victorious enemy. The
result is that a contemptibly small minority
of its nominal subjects, who happen really to
have some material force at their disposal,
have set it absolutely at defiance. Did it
occur to anybody who attended the London
meeting that female suffrage would have a
constant tendency to reproduce this state of
things? To the extent of at least one-haH,
deliberative assemblies would represent not
physical strength but physical inirmity; and
the part of the body polite which was con-
scious of material strength, and which on &C.
casions of national emergency would be ex-
clusively called up to use it, would be per-
petually overruled by coalitions between its
own weaker members and the masses of the
other sex. So gross a paradox can only be
overlooked by those who have given no Sc
rious thought to the matter, or by those who
have failed to observe how vast is the part
taken by material force in all political orga-
nizations.
1t is not difficult to see that the movement
for female suffrage has reached its present
point through the obscurity in which the
essential association of government with force
is systematically kept. The arguments by
which successive extensions of the suffrage
have been justified have really been of such
a nature as to establish case, or all but esta-
blish it, for giving votes to women. The
v,Io of Mr. otb for
summing up the whole opinion of a nation
with absolute accuracy irresistibly suggested
that the opinion of women should be taken
as we'll as the opinion of men. Mr.. Mill, even
when he did not directly advocate female suf-
frage, indirectly contended for it by those
pT5OTI arguments which of late have had so
strange an attraction for him; and Mr.
Bright's speeches invariably pointed to the
conclusion that any constituency, however
formed, was, provided that it was numerous,
better than the existing constituencies.
When Mr.. Disraeli invented the conservative
working man who was a devotee and not q
critic of the Constitution, he laid himself
open to the remark that stancher Conserva-
tives than workmen were to be found in
women; and Mr.. Gladstone, who pleaded that
householders, even when they paid no
rates, were our own flesh and
blood, could hardly have denied
that our mothers, sisters, and daughters,
whether they paid rates or not, were our own
flesh and blood also. But the enormous ma
jority of those who supported opposed
these extensions of the suffrage had at the
bottom of their minds the consciousness that
the proposal was to join voting power with
material power. Multitudes, when they con-
sist of male persons, are vast embodiments
of physical strength, even when they are
unarmed. This consideration was with some
the very reason for extending the suffrage
irpn coi1 xuna tne
masses may be able and willing to put forth
all their slumbering power, but they are less
likely to exert it brutally if they have the
means of expressing their opinions freely anC
giving effect to them peacefully. Others
were affected in q different way by the vas
reserve of physical strength in the masses
The inherent power of numbers, they urged
is so great that, when united to voting power
it must bear down all other influences. Tht
proposal to give votes to women, though
superfcially similar to plans for enfranchisint
large numbers of men, is wholly and RADICAL,
unlike them. For the first time in European
history it is seriously suggested that vas
multitude of persons shall be admitted to po
litical power in case where mul
titude simply means multiplied weak
ness. The whole of the conditions of po
litical society would be altered by such al
experiment, and no human being can sa,
more of its probable consequences than tina
they would certainly tend towards anarchy
The wholesale admission in America of tn
negroes of the Southern States to votes
which, insulting as the comparison seems,
the only precedent in point-was really con
trivance of the party which commanded tn
material strength in the North to previd
itself with a vast amount of voting power t
be used in aid of its generals and armies
Neither Republicans nor radicals have tn
faintest intention of submitting to negr
opinion, if it should assert itself independ
emily. If female suffrage were established
it would only be maintained by q close all
ance between female politicians and some on
confederacy of men which was powerfU
enough to hold its own without their assist
ance. The objection of certain members q
Parliament, which at the meeting was treate
as frivolous and selfish, that their seats woul
he put in jeopardy by giving women votes
seems to us an extremely grave and form
dable consideration started in rather narro
way.
If the ladies who are earnestly engaged in til
agitation could bring themselves to conside
what are the admissions which sensible me
are ready to make with regard to their SCI
they might possibly be induced to limit the
endeavors, and thus to aim at objects whic
are not wholly unattainable. Whatever /
the opinions of one sex on the physical an
intellectual inferiority of the other, no ol
servant or thoughtful man denies the exi
tence in considerable numbers of very ab
women, approaching closely in some fe
cases to the highest standard of abilit
amongst men, and In many more rising f
above the level of mediocrity. Some of the
women are practically disqualified for polit