Still others think that as women are taxed like men, they should not be denied control of public expenditures to an equal degree.

Analyzing the situation somewhat more deeply, Professor Thomas Reed Powell, of Columbia University, addressing the Academy of Political Science, November twentieth, 1914,* sought to obtain a view of the matter uninfluenced by precedent and habit. "The electorate," he said,

is the legal sovereign body. But an electorate which does not include all persons subject to government may be regarded also as an organ of government as the legislature and the executive are organs of government. It acts for others, not merely for itself. To present to the consideration of an electorate a proposal to share its power with others resembles in some fashion a request to an autocrat to surrender his autocracy. Such a request is hard to a Romanoff. But the suggestion that the existing electorate of New York may view with like mind the question of enfranchising woman seems at once absurd-which is greatly to its credit. Yet the electorate might well ask itself how it came to have this power of decision. Explanations have been given which are reminders of the theory of divine right. Disguised survivals of this generally discarded notion are by no means infrequent. It is well to bear in mind that any governmental mechanism is a human contrivance, subject to such alteration as human judgment dictates. Those who through the chance of history are vested with power to determine the composition of the electorate may be aided in reaching a wise decision by putting thmselves in the mental attitude of one who is called upon to construct for the first time a government of a community of which he is not a member. Our minds would be more untrammeled in considering the problem if we assume a situation in which all the governed are asked to select an electorate, and ask ourselves whether under such circumstances it would be rational to make discriminations solely on the basis of sex.

Professor Powell also called attention to the American ideal of government based on the consent of the governed and remarked,

we seldom hear it baldly stated that the highest ideal of government is one which subjects one-half of the adult population to a coercion in whose formation and direction they have no personal share.

3For instance, Senator Hughes of New Jersey. New York Times, Editorial, Sept. 19, 1915.

Proceedings of the Academy, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 73, seq.

There may, however, be certain conflicting elements which we may deem more important than government based on the consent of the governed-"we are told that the women would hurt the ballot and that the ballot would hurt the women." Asserting that similar arguments have always been used against extensions of the suffrage, and pronouncing voting not more of a task to women than going to school, he came to the diametrically opposite conclusion that, in all probability, "the women will help the ballot and the ballot will help the women." Professor Powell uttered a word of warning to those expect

5

ing that women will vote as a class,—

Those who treat women as a class from the standpoint of suffrage, must show that most women differ from most men in ways which relate to their capacity to do what men do when they consider how to vote and when they go to the polls. The attempt to establish such differences is made by suffragists and anti-suffragists alike. In both cases it seems equally futile. Only by reason of circumstances does any sane advocacy of the expansion of the electorate to include all the normal adult members of the community seem to be urging the enfranchisement of women as a class. It is rather an objection to the exclusion of women as a class, solely by reason of their sex.

If in these times the importance and effectiveness of the individual vote depended on individual physical strength behind it, this would be important in considering whether women should be enfranchised. It. might require us to disfranchise the invalids and the aged among the men. The difference in physical capacity between men and women might be important if political issues were to be decided on sex lines. But no one can seriously believe that this is possible."

Irrespective of this possibility, however, the "difference in physical capacity between men and women" is precisely the ground upon which Professor Munroe Smith, whose paper immediately followed Professor Powell's, endeavored to persuade

se. g., "In the New York constitutional convention of 1821, Chancellor Kent, in opposing the removal of property qualifications for suffrage, urged that it would result in inequality of taxation, the abuse of liberty, the oppression of minorities, the disturbance of chartered privileges, and the degradation of justice. 'I hope, sir,' he said addressing the convention, we shall not carry desolation through all the departments of the fabric erected by our fathers. I hope we shall not put forward to the world a constitution such as will merit the scorn of the wise and the tears of the patriot.'" Kent's arguments are quoted at considerable length by Johnson, Readings in American Constitutional History, 356, seq. By amendment of 1826 New York abolished the property qualification.

In the original this paragraph precedes the former.

"The Consent of the Governed; Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, Vol. V, No. 1, p. 82, seq. (1914). Professor Smith is also of the Columbia faculty.

the Academy of Political Science that women should not share "The consent of the governed,'" Professor Smith

the ballot." declared,

has meant, historically, the consent of those who were actually or potentially fighting units. Voting was invented, in early communities, to find out whether the rank and file of fighting men would or would not support action proposed by their leaders.

With the use of mercenaries by Rome consent was unnecessary and voting disappeared-to be revived again when armed service became necessary among free citizens, but only among those classes whose services in arms were needed. Democracy reappeared in mediaeval towns because every able-bodied man was needed to maintain their pace and safety. And today

suffrage may be regarded as resting, in principle, on the historic basis of armed service that may be exacted; not alone upon the duty of service in foreign or civil war, but also on the duty to maintain the peace and to aid in the enforcement of the law. Under our national and state laws every male citizen within certain age limits may be called upon for such service.

"So long as force plays any part in the determination of policy, in the operation of government and in the maintenance of the legal order," Professor Smith concludes,

there is possible and even probable danger in the inclusion of women in the electorate. We are accustomed to think that when we have voted, the defeated party must necessarily accept the result. The earliest method of counting votes was probably by division. The division was probably, at the outset, a line-up for a fight, and the submission of the shorter to the longer line was due to ocular demonstration that resistance would be hopeless. . . . In our own country, in 1860, Lincoln had a majority in the electoral college. The Southerners knew, however, that he was a minority president, and they declined to accept the result. In England, in 1913, an Irish home-rule bill was passed by a considerable parliamentary majority. The men of Ulster and the Unionists asserted that this majority in Parliament did not represent the majority of the men in Great Britain. . . . When the results of an election are peacefully accepted by the defeated party, and when laws and judgments appear to be self-executing, it seems highly probable that acquiescence still depends to some extent upon the conviction that resistance is hopeless. If now we inject into the electorate that portion of the adult population which does not represent fighting force which was taken off the fight

ing line when men advanced from savagery to barbarism-what will be the effect upon the men who have been defeated in elections or who object to the enforcement of particular laws? Their disposition to acquiesce will certainly not be increased. How far it will be lessened depends on two further questions. The first of these questions is whether, in any given case, these men are likely to believe that the election was carried or the law established by the votes of women rather than by those of men. Where this is not ascertainable, they may choose to believe whatever they wish to believe. The second and more fundamental question is, how far the most civilized nations of the present day have emergd from barbarism and become wholly and sweetly reasonable. It is not until this last evolution is completed that men will always and unhesitatingly accept a vote as an expression of the social will, ceasing to ask or to care how much force there is behind the will.

To the New York Times, on the other hand, the assertion of such claims against the expendiency of equal suffrage “is simply to play into the hands of the adversary." Commenting on Ex-president Roosevelt's remark that

no man is fit to be the free citizen of a free republic unless he is able to bear arms and serve with efficiency in the army,

which was being advanced as an anti-suffrage argument, that staunch journalistic opponent of suffrage said,

In the first place, Col. Roosevelt is wrong and the right to vote does not depend on physical force; if it did every blind man would be disenfranchised. But aside from that, the part the woman plays in the defence of a nation from attack is not less than that which the man plays. Col. Roosevelt himself has recognized that over and over again.

Those opposed to the extension of the franchise to women do not confine their arguments, however, to the lessons they derive from history and political theory. For instance, the editorial just quoted asserted

that the objections to woman suffrage are many and weighty; the chief among them is the danger of increasing the electorate by a body of citizens who have shown no special aptitude for dealing with the kind of questions that are submitted to voters, and whose view of such questions is likely to be amateurish, and that the consequences of such an enlargement might be disastrous is a fact too plain to be waved aside. Woman suffrage is a dangerous experiment, and the agitation for it is Editorial, Nov. 23, 1914, three days after Prof. Smith's paper was read.

a regrettable incident in our national life. The reasons against it are deep and strong. There is no sense in opposing it with bogies and false theories; when that is done it simply increases the momentum which has carried the "cause" to victory in twelve States.

In a highly interesting address" prepared for the suffrage committee of the United States Senate in 1913 critical examination was made of five tenets upon which the equal suffragists were assumed to rest their arguments :

To the claim that suffrage is an inherent right the reply was

that it does not exist for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the state; that it is not a personal prerogative to be born to, but a privilege for public service to be earned; and that two things should determine its exercise-fitness and expediency.

To the claim that women should have a voice in making the laws they have to obey it was answered that

women can, and do, influence legislation much more directly and effectively than anybody ever does by means of the ballot.

To the objection of no taxation without representation, it was answered that women are represented just as much as infants and foreigners, who are taxed, but have no vote.

To the claim that modern conditions, which have developed on a vast scale industries and business practice employing women outside the home, render women's exercise of the ballot necessary in order that they may secure the state's aid in obtaining just wages and suitable surroundings the reply was as follows,

It is not surprising, perhaps, that the economic argument-though the most unreasonable is the most alluring to women, illustrating the maxim of "the wish being father to the thought." In vain we pelt the supporters of this idea with the economic banalties about "supply and demand" regulating the price of labor, as of all other marketable commodities; no use to cite the case of men who have never obtained a wage-increase through the ballot, but always had to "strike" for it. The Suffrage economist calmly announces that when women get the bal

By Mrs. Annie Riley Hale of New York City. Issued by the Guidon Club Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Mrs. Hale has just published a book entitled The Eden Sphinx, which is advertised as the "frankest answer yet given to the woman question."