From such a point of view one easily sees the strength of the demand for the ballot on the part of certain disfranchised classes.  When women ask for the ballot, they are asking, not for a privilege, but for a necessity.  You may not see the necessity, you may easily argue that women do not need to vote.  Indeed, the women themselves in considerable numbers may agree with you.  Nevertheless, women do need the ballot.  They need it to right the balance of a world sadly awry because of its brutal neglect of the rights of women and children.  With the best will and knowledge, no man can know women’s wants as well as women themselves.  To disfranchise women is deliberately to turn from knowledge and grope in ignorance.

So, too, with American Negroes:  the South continually insists that a benevolent guardianship of whites over blacks is the ideal thing.  They assume that white people not only know better what Negroes need than Negroes themselves, but that they are anxious to supply these needs.  As a result they grope in ignorance and helplessness.  They cannot “understand” the Negro; they cannot protect him from cheating and lynching; and, in general, instead of loving guardianship we see anarchy and exploitation.  If the Negro could speak for himself in the South instead of being spoken for, if he could defend himself instead of having to depend on the chance sympathy of white citizens, how much healthier a growth of democracy the South would have.

So, too, with the darker races of the world.  No federation of the world, no true inter-nation—­can exclude the black and brown and yellow races from its counsels.  They must equally and according to number act and be heard at the world’s council.

It is not, for a moment, to be assumed that enfranchising women will not cost something.  It will for many years confuse our politics.  It may even change the present status of family life.  It will admit to the ballot thousands of inexperienced persons, unable to vote intelligently.  Above all, it will interfere with some of the present prerogatives of men and probably for some time to come annoy them considerably.

So, too, Negro enfranchisement meant reconstruction, with its theft and bribery and incompetency as well as its public schools and enlightened, social legislation.  It would mean today that black men in the South would have to be treated with consideration, have their wishes respected and their manhood rights recognized.  Every white Southerner, who wants peons beneath him, who believes in hereditary menials and a privileged aristocracy, or who hates certain races because of their characteristics, would resent this.

Notwithstanding this, if America is ever to become a government built on the broadest justice to every citizen, then every citizen must be enfranchised.  There may be temporary exclusions, until the ignorant and their children are taught, or to avoid too sudden an influx of inexperienced voters.  But such exclusions can be but temporary if justice is to prevail.