A very short space having been allotted to us for the consideration of a topic which Mr. Parkman has been allowed to treat <i>in extenso</i>, we must necessarily be content to pass his arguments in the briefest review, though not with cursory criticism. And we must say, in the first place, that these arguments are already very familiar to the advocates of woman suffrage. In every suffrage convention, and in legislative hearings on this subject, each of the points which he tries to make is taken up and carefully considered, full opportunity being granted to those who think otherwise to bring forward their view of the case. We can not remember any of those occasions in which the advantage has not remained with the friends of the measure. A person who wished to be rude to an eminent literary man told him that her own father had always advised her to avoid a schoolmaster. The gentleman replied, "It is evident that you have." The tenor of Mr. Parkman's remarks makes it very evident to us that, in his study of the woman-suffrage question, he has avoided the opportunities of enlightenment which its friends would gladly afford him. When he accuses them of occupying the platform with "frothy declamation" and the press with sensational stories; when he avers that, instead of claiming for women what is theirs, "a nature of their own, with laws of its own, and a high capacity of independent development, they propose, as the aim of their ambition, the imitation of men" -- the friends of woman suffrage may be sure that Mr. Parkman has neither attended their meetings, nor read the journals and pamphlets in which their views are set forth. He can not have heard William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone -- he can not have read George William Curtis and Mary Eastman.
Why should one sex assume to legislate for both? Because it always has done so? That is no reason. All the innovations which have blest mankind might have been excluded from use on the same ground. Because the sex which claims the right to do this has the stronger muscles? It does not use these in the act of voting. Because the sexes differ from each other in certain moral and mental characteristics? This would seem to make it important that the necessities of each should bave equal representation in a fair government. Because there is, on the whole, a substantial agreement between them in feeling and in interest? This fact, if granted, would merely make it very safe for women to represent their own side in their own way. Because the political enfranchisement of the hitherto non-voting sex would overthrow the family? In this view it is strange that the male advocates of woman suffrage are oftenest found among married men. Because one sex is military and militant, the other pacific and unmilitant? Do the fighting men of a community govern it? Woe to it if they do! Military rule is armed despotism. The solid sense of mankind to-day is against it. Because women have already possessed political power, and have abused it? This argument can be used with triple force against the other sex, whose abuse of political power is in large proportion to their use of it.
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