We have now breathlessly rehearsed the greater part of Mr. Parkman's objections to woman, or, as be calls it, female suffrage. Despite the narrow limits here assigned us, we will take time to reconsider one or two of them. The argument that women should not vote because they can not fight is a very threadbare one. It is an instance of that imaginary relation between two circumstances which leads the incautious thinker to link them together as cause and effect. What real connection is there between the act of fighting and the act of voting? A certain proportion only of the men of this or of any community are able to bear arms. Of these, a still smaller number will be called upon to do so, and that during a certain term of years only. Will those fighting men show any characteristics which shall make the ballot safer in their hands than in those of their non-fighting fellow citizens? The contrary impression seems generally to prevail among thoughtful people. The blind, unreasoning obedience of an army to its chiefs is felt to be at variance with the spirit of inquiry in which a voter should study the claims and merits of his candidate. Shall we say that the military are the guardians of the public peace? That office, in our day, seems to belong more clearly to the mother and the schoolteacher. Justice claims the right to govern. Education enforces the recognition of law, the respect of right, the claim of duty. The agencies which moralize society are its true defense, its real bulwark. The merciful and patient work of women can spare more bloodshed to any generation than can the whole military order.
What Mr. Parkman says about sex makes us feel that the masculine view of this attribute, too often reflected in the feminine mind, is liable to great exaggeration. Like every leading attribute of human nature, it is either a weakness or a power, according as it is intelligently trained or blindly followed. When men intentionally use it as a power, they naturally desire that it should become a weakness in those upon whom they wish to exert that power. Sex is certainly an important agent in human affairs, but not the most important. Its influence is easily exaggerated and lost. Men and women may have too much sexuality as well as too little. Society, if impoverished by the insufficiency of this quality, is also degraded by its excess. In men or in women sex is a power only when it is made subservient to reason, when thought and duty common to both sexes are brought forward and dwelt upon, uplifting both alike to self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice.
It is a great mistake to state the career of either sex as if its boundaries were necessarily definite and predetermined. Men are forced to undertake many things which are abhorrent to the ease which human nature covets. It is not their sex which leads them to do this, but some inner or outer necessity. Women are subject to these same necessities, and must again and again sacrifice personal convenience and inclination in view of offices whose performance becomes imperative. The farmer's wife digs potatoes in the field when he is too busy to do it. The farmer's daughter rides the mowing-machine when the men of the family are away with the army. The wife and mother, for whom domestic seclusion is made by theorists such a sine qua non, must feed helpless children by her labor, and support an invalid or profligate husband. Daughters keep aged fathers out of the almshouse. Sisters work at the loom to send a brother through his college course. In these cases the convenience of sex has to be set aside. The woman is obliged to ask, not "What is my sex?" but "What is my necessity, and how can I meet it?" The opponents of woman suffrage find nothing unfeminine in these acts, which tax the physique of the more tender sex far more severely than does the twofold effort of considering the merits of a candidate and recording one's conclusion by dropping a ballot in a box.
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