The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1894-08-10
OUR SUFFRAGE DEBATE,
Continued From Last Page.)

1
Continued From Last Pdge.)
the ordering, the comforting and the
beau tiful adornment of the State"
Now / believe that every womanly
woman must feel the wendrous
breadth and beauty of these funda'
mental truths and / wonder that sc
many of them should reason that the
surest method of accomplishing theil
distinctive work should come in the
way Of franchise, that the fine femi.
nine intuition should be deceived by
extraneous considerations.
For natural law must not be ignOr.
ed. The power of passivity feeds the
sources of active life, and who so dis
regards the limitations of his being
only expresses weakness instead OF
strength. The ballot as an express
sion of individual opinion is very
simple thing, but all that it entails is
most complex. Politics, statecraft, in
its strenuous grasp of huge conflict
ing forces demands more vitality than
woman can expend without too
CT eat a cost, for physical reasons, If
there were no other, because the wom-
an is, and still must be, the mother,
she should be spared from such a
grievous strain. A woman may do
many marvellous things but she can
not serve two masters, and the con-
slant iteration on the part of our suf-
frage leaders that woman In public
life is just as good wife and mother
shows repeatedly that the sweet home
essence is already in imminent dam
ger.
We must consider the necessities of
bread-winning and artistic develop
ment, but 1 believe that the increas-
ing choice of boastful independence,
regardless of any rightful impetus
must initiate mole and more against
love and marriage and motherhood,
and thus trample out the sacred we'll
spring of the woman's rightful being.
The Won ans Office is to inspire, the
mans to construct. The woman sug-
gests, the man creates, and when
either does the others work the result
must be the penalty that comes with
disobedience to any inherent decree.
Hence l believe that if woman
should gain any modicum of civic
strength by the ballot it would be
largely overbalanced by loss of spirit
ual power and manly energy. A ma
jority of the men in every village
church have fallen into idleness and
indifference because the women have
taken upon themselves the greater
portion of the heaviest burdens, quite
after the fashion of our familiar squaw.
1 believe similar result would follow
the responsibility of the ballot in the
work of the commonwealth, and be-
cause this is so evident perversion of
the real womanly purpose 1 believe
that the dream OF purifying politics by
woman suffrage isone ofthe dangerous
chimeras of our disordered day.
1t was not Minerva with all her
wisdom who cleansed the Augean sta
bles and killed the Lernean hydra,
but Hercules clad in the robe that she
had given him. The goddess under
stood the more excellent way, and we
shall not reach a higher level in polit-
ical methods and morals by any posi-
BILE substitution of the divine order
which has given to the woman nobler
place and deeper power than the man
may ever hope to measure or define.
And being entrusted with such rare dis
she owes to herself, to the home
and to the commonwealth, the most
loyalty to the womanly |
ideal and the finest freedom from every
slig htest thing that harms the highest
From such a basis she
would accomplish her rightful work
in the simplest, most exalted way,
and with the key to her mission once
more in her hand we should no longer
ask if women want to vote, nor have
10 cut away such masses of parasitic
growth to reach Gods signet on the
mother heart.
FLORENCE l.. Snow.