The arguments for and against woman suffrage have all been discussed so often that it will hardly be possible to offer anything which will be new to the readers of the Christian Science Journal. But until the truth militant becomes the truth triumphant, it has to be restated again and again, however weary both friends and foes may grow of the repetition. Perhaps the friends are the wearier of the two. It has been well said, "To hammer away at the same old sins with the same old truths, and yet to strike fire,—that is work." At all events, if the opponents of the reform are weary of hearing about it, no one need pity them. They are simply in the position of the Unjust Judge in the parable.
The general argument for woman suffrage was stated when God said, "It is not good for man to be alone." The whole history of the race shows this. Every department of human affairs from which women have been excluded, has been left more or less barbarous, and the history of civilization is the history of their admission to one department after another, carrying with them always a softening and humanizing influence. Rev. Samuel J. May said: "The true family is the type of the State. It is the absence of the feminine from the conduct of the governments of the earth that makes them more or less savage. The State is now in a condition of half orphanage. There are Fathers of the State, but no Mothers." The good results we hope for, from the co-operation of men and women in government, are the same good results that have been already realized from their co-operation everywhere else. Twenty-seven years ago, Henry Ward Beecher said: "Since the world began, to refine society has been woman's function. You may be sure that she who has carried refinement to the household, to the church, to social life, to literature, to art, to every interest except government, will also carry it to legislation, and the whole of civil and public procedure, if it is to be carried there at all."
To say this is not to claim that women are superior to men. Personally, I believe that if women alone had been entrusted with the government, they would have erred as widely as men have done, though in an opposite direction. Each sex is superior to the other in some points, and inferior in others. The two are complementary. The ideal government is not one of men alone, nor of women alone, but of the two together. As it takes two eyes for correct vision, so it requires the union of the masculine and feminine points of view to get a true perspective, in looking at all social and public questions.
