The doubling of the number of ignorant voters by giving all women alike the ballot would be a more serious affair.  A remedy for that, however, lies in making an educational test a necessary qualification for all voters.  In this connection the remarks of Mr. G.H.  Putnam are suggestive[419]:  “If I were a citizen of Massachusetts or of any State which, like Massachusetts, possesses such educational qualification, I should be an active worker for the cause of equal suffrage.  As a citizen of New York who has during the last fifty years done his share of work in the attempt to improve municipal conditions, I am forced to the conclusion that it will be wiser to endure for a further period the inconsistency, the stupidity, and the injustice of the disfranchisement of thousands of intelligent women voters rather than to accept the burden of an increase in the mass of unintelligent voters.  The first step toward ‘equal suffrage’ will, in my judgment, be a fight for an educational qualification for all voters.”

Those who maintain that when women are independent and self-asserting, they will lose their influence over men, assume that we view things to-day as they did a century ago and that the thoughts of men are not widened with the progress of the suns.  The woman who can share the aspirations, the thoughts, the complete life of a man, who can understand his work thoroughly and support him with the sympathy born of perfect comprehension, will exert a far vaster influence over him than the milk-and-water ideal who was advised “to smile when her husband smiled, to frown when he frowned, and to be discreetly silent when the conversation turned on subjects of importance.”  It is a good thing for women to be self-asserting and independent.  There is and always has been a class of men who, like Mr. Murdstone, are amenable to justice and reason only when they know that their proposed victim can at any time break the chains with which they would bind her.

This brings us to the last of the social or political arguments, viz., “Most women do not want to vote."[420] Precisely the same argument has been used by slave owners from time immemorial—­the slaves do not wish to be free.  As Professor Thomas writes[421]:  “Certainly the negroes of Virginia did not greatly desire freedom before the idea was developed by agitation from the outside, and many of them resented this outside interference.  ’In general, in the whole western Sahara desert, slaves are as much astonished to be told that their relation to their owners is wrong and that they ought to break it, as boys amongst us would be to be told that their relation to their fathers was wrong and ought to be broken.’  And it is reported from eastern Borneo that a white man could hire no natives for wages.  ’They thought it degrading to work for wages, but if he would buy them, they would work for him.’” It is akin to the old contention of despots that when their subjects are fit for freedom, they will make them free; but nobody has ever seen such a time.