The women who have been running for office in those Western States have drawn the line on kissing babies, saying that they are too well versed in hygiene to commit that crime. As has been remarked, women are entirely too much given to sentiment to be allowed to vote.
Anti-suffrage literature declares that the enfranchisement of women will “efface the natural differentiation of function between the two sexes.” Oh, no, it won’t! Nature can’t be effaced and the differentiation will go right on differentiating just the same.
What a queer way they have in Great Britain of encouraging matrimony! There are about a million more women than men, but when the Canadian government begged that some of the women might be sent over as wives for the English immigrants, the authorities in England vetoed it because the women were needed to work in the cotton mills.
Perhaps in the U.S. women should not vote because they cannot fight but the man in England who said this would have to run to cover.
“We believe that political equality will deprive us of special privileges hitherto accorded us by law,” cry the anti-suffragists. How very sad! Will they please name one or two special privileges that the women have lost in those States where they can vote?
The government is closing all the saloons on the reservations to protect the Indians, and the Southern Legislatures are passing drastic temperance laws to protect the negroes. It seems to be left to the women to demand measures for the protection of the white men.
A Missouri legislator has introduced a bill that the buttons on the back of a woman’s dress shall be as large as a silver quarter. Some time when those women legislators out West cannot find anything else to do they will introduce a bill that men shall cease wearing any buttons at all on the back and cuffs of their coat.
The Anti-Suffrage Association is to be congratulated on the latest contribution to its literature by Abdul Hamid, the deposed Sultan of Turkey. There is such a similarity between his opinions on woman suffrage and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s that it certainly is either a case of plagiarism or two souls with but a single thought.
Harvard University has taken off the ban and allowed a speech on woman suffrage within its sacred walls. If the ban had remained on a little longer it would not have been necessary to take it off.