This second proposition of the advocates of female suffrage is of a general character. It does not point to particular abuses, it claims the right of woman to vote as one which she should demand, whether practically needed or not. It is asserted that to disqualify half the race from voting is an abuse entirely inconsistent with the first principles of American politics. The answer to this is plain. The elective franchise is not an end; it is only a means. A good government is indeed an inalienable right. Just so far as the elective franchise will conduce to this great end, to that point it becomes also a right, but no farther. A male suffrage wisely free, including all capable of justly appreciating its importance, and honestly discharging its responsibilities, becomes a great advantage to a nation. But universal suffrage, pushed to its extreme limits, including all men, all women, all minors beyond the years of childhood, would inevitably be fraught with evil. There have been limits to the suffrage of the freest nations. Such limits have been found necessary by all past political experience. In this country, at the present hour, there are restrictions upon the suffrage in every State. Those restrictions vary in character. They are either national, relating to color, political, mental, educational, connected with a property qualification, connected with sex, connected with minority of years, or they are moral in their nature.*
[FOOTNOTE by SFC} *In connection with this point of moral qualification we venture to ask a question. Why not enlarge the criminal classes from whom the suffrage is now withheld? Why not exclude every man convicted of any degrading legal crime, even petty larceny? And why not exclude from the suffrage all habitual drunkards judicially so declared? These are changes which would do vastly more of good than admitting women to vote. {END
FOOTNOTE}
This restriction connected with sex is, in fact, but one of many other restrictions, considered more or less necessary even in a democracy.
Manhood suffrage is a very favorite term of the day. But, taken in the plain meaning of those words, such fullness of suffrage has at the present hour no actual existence in any independent nation, or in any extensive province. It does not exist, as we have just seen, even among the men of America. And, owing to the conditions of human life, we may well believe that unrestricted fullness of manhood suffrage never can exist in any great nation for any length of time. In those States of the American Union which approach nearest to a practical manhood suffrage, unnaturalized foreigners, minors, and certain classes of criminals, are excluded from voting.
And why so? What is the cause of this exclusion? Here are men by tens of thousands--men of widely different classes and conditions--peremptorily deprived of a privilege asserted to be a positive inalienable right universal in its application. There is manifestly some reason for this apparently contradictory state of things. We know that reason to be the good of society. It is for the good of society that the suffrage is withheld from those classes of men. A certain fitness for the right use of the suffrage is therefore deemed necessary before granting it. A criminal, an unnaturalized foreigner, a minor, have not that fitness; consequently the suffrage is withheld from them. The worthy use of the vote is, then, a qualification not yet entirely overlooked by our legislators. The State has had, thus far, no scruples in withholding the suffrage even from men, whenever it has believed that the grant would prove injurious to the nation.
Here we have the whole question clearly defined. The good of society is the true object of all human government. To this principle suffrage itself is subordinate. It can never be more than a means looking to the attainment of good government, and not necessarily its corner-stone. Just so far is it wise and right. Move one step beyond that point, and instead of a benefit the suffrage may become a cruel injury. The governing power of our own country--the most free of all great nations--practically proclaims that it has no right to bestow the suffrage wherever its effects are likely to become injurious to the whole nation, by allotting different restrictions to the suffrage in every State of the Union. The right of suffrage is, therefore, most clearly not an absolutely inalienable right universal in its application.
It has its limits. These limits are marked out by plain justice and common-sense. Women have thus far been excluded from the suffrage precisely on the same principles--from the conviction that to grant them this particular privilege would, in different ways, and especially by withdrawing them from higher and more urgent duties, and allotting to them other duties for which they are not so well fitted, become injurious to the nation, and, we add, ultimately injurious to themselves, also, as part of the nation. If it can be proved that this conviction is sound and just, founded on truth, the assumed inalienable right of suffrage, of which we have been hearing so much lately, vanishes into the "baseless fabric of a vision." If the right were indeed inalienable, it should be granted, without regard to consequences, as an act of abstract justice. But, happily for us, none but the very wildest theorists are prepared to take this view of the question of suffrage. The advocates of female suffrage must, therefore, abandon the claim of inalienable right. Such a claim can not logically be maintained for one moment in the face of existing facts. We proceed to the third point.
THIRDLY. THE ELEVATION OF THE ENTIRE SEX, THE GENERAL PURIFICATION OF POLITICS THROUGH THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN, AND THE CONSEQUENT ADVANCE OF THE WHOLE RACE. Such, we are told, must be the inevitable results of what is called the emancipation of woman, the entire independence of woman through the suffrage.
