Of course, when the voting-lists with the women’s names are ready to be printed, it will be interesting to speculate as to how these new monarchs of our destiny will use their power.  For myself, a long course of observation in the anti-slavery and woman-suffrage movements has satisfied me that women are not idiots, and that, on the whole, when they give their minds to a question, whether moral or practical, they understand it quite as readily as men.  In the anti-slavery movement it is certain that a woman, Elizabeth Heyrick, gave the first impulse to its direct and simple solution in England; and that another woman, Mrs. Stowe, did more than any man, except perhaps Garrison and John Brown, to secure its right solution here.  There was never a moment, I am confident, when any great political question growing out of the anti-slavery struggle might not have been put to vote more safely among the women of New England than among the clergy, or the lawyers, or the college professors.  If they did so well in that great issue, it is fair to assume that, after they have a sufficient inducement to study out future issues, they at least will not be very much behind the men.

But we cannot keep it too clearly in view, that the whole question, whether women would vote better or worse than men on general questions, is a minor matter.  It was equally a minor matter in case of the negroes.  We gave the negroes the ballot, simply because they needed it for their own protection; and we shall by and by give it to women for the same reason.  Tried by that test, we shall find that their statesmanship will be genuine.  When they come into power, drunken husbands will no longer control their wives’ earnings, and a chief justice will no longer order a child to be removed from its mother, amid its tears and outcries, merely because that mother has married again.  And if, as we are constantly assured, woman’s first duty is to her home and her children, she may count it a good beginning in statesmanship to secure to herself the means of protecting both.  That once settled, it will be time enough to “interview” her in respect to the proper rate of duty on pig-iron.

TOO MUCH PREDICTION

“Seek not to proticipate,” says Mrs. Gamp, the venerable nurse in “Martin Chuzzlewit”—­“but take ’em as they come, and as they go.”  I am persuaded that our woman-suffrage arguments would be improved by this sage counsel, and that at present we indulge in too many bold anticipations.

Is there not altogether too much tendency to predict what women will do when they vote?  Could that good time come to-morrow, we should be startled to find to how many different opinions and “causes” the new voters were already pledged.  One speaker wishes that women should be emancipated, because of the fidelity with which they are sure to support certain desirable measures, as peace, order, freedom, temperance, righteousness, and judgment to come.  Then the next speaker has his or her schedule of political virtues and is equally confident that women, if once enfranchised, will guarantee clear majorities for them all.  The trouble is that we thus mortgage this new party of the future, past relief, beyond possibility of payment, and incur the ridicule of the unsanctified by committing our cause to a great many contradictory pledges.