“In North Carolina such a decision would readmit to the polls 125,000 negro votes.  What preparation have we made to meet such a possible result?  I know of but one remedy.  The census shows that the white population of North Carolina is seventy per cent. and the colored population thirty per cent.  It follows that the white adult women of North Carolina are more in numbers than the negro men and negro women combined. The votes of 260,000 white women can be relied on to stand solid against any measure or any man who proposes to question Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

“I am not intimating that the admission of the white women to the polls will secure democratic supremacy (they will not impair it), nor that it will prejudice the republican element.  The equal suffrage movement has never proceeded on party lines and the women would scorn to be admitted unless they were as free in their choice of party measures and candidates as the men.  But what I am saying is that if the negroes are readmitted by a decision of the Federal Court to suffrage, the 260,000 votes of the white women of the State will be one solid obstacle to any measure that would impair either for them or their children the continuance of white supremacy.”

III.  WOMEN DO NOT WANT TO VOTE AND HENCE IT IS UNFAIR TO THRUST THE VOTE UPON THEM BY FEDERAL AMENDMENT.

We have two classes of voters in the United States, young men who automatically become voters at twenty-one, and naturalized citizens.  No one among them has ever been asked whether he wishes the vote.  It was “thrust upon them” all as a privilege which each would use or not as he desired.  To extend the suffrage to those who do not desire it is no hardship, since only those who wish the privilege will use it.  On the other hand, it becomes an intolerable oppression to deny it to those who want it.  The vote is permissive, not obligatory.  It imposes no definite responsibility; it extends a liberty.  That there are women who do not want the vote is true, but the well-known large number of qualified men who do not use the vote, indicates that the desire to have someone else assume the responsibility of public service is not confined to women.  It is an easy excuse to say “wait until all the women want it,” but it is a poor rule which doesn’t work both ways.  Had it been necessary for members of Congress to wait until all men wanted the vote before they had one for themselves, we should be living in an unconstitutional monarchy.  More, had it been necessary for women to wait until all women approved of college or even public school education for girls, property rights, the right of free speech, or any one of the many liberties now enjoyed by women, but formerly denied them, the iniquities of the old common law would still measure the privileges of women, and high schools and colleges would still close their doors to women.

A certain way to test whether any class of people want the vote is to note the numbers of those who use it when granted.