All these writers agree in demanding the ballot in order to make some essential change in woman's condition. Some of them hold that this change cannot be made unless the relations of wife and mother can be set aside when the individual considers them detrimental; others hold that it can be made and leave the relations intact; and one believes that this change is already so far made, while the relations are still intact, that nothing need be feared from further change. It reduces itself to matter of opinion and prophecy on the part of those who agree with the early leaders that essential change is needed, but do not agree with them as to the steps necessary. The appeal must be to facts.
The originators of the movement ought to know what the movement meant. The marriage laws were the first attacked, and are still being hammered at in favor of divorce, although legislation has outrun their demand in changing the outgrown laws in regard to property and contracts. Mr. Hooker said: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement." How can that be, when the women who inspired the Suffrage movement, and who began it and still carry it on, proclaimed this as a necessary part? But, this question aside, it may be said that the marriage relation has been the most unsafe in the hands of the women whose idea of equality either repudiates it outright or inveighs against its present status. From the revolutionary and infidel portion of France, from which it sprang, to the recently dead Oneida Community, who but women who imbibed the doctrine that marriage was bondage, have sustained the various forms of license which called itself freedom? Transcendentalism and Libertinism worked together, and both found women who could be fitted to the task of destroying the home.
Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed "naturally." There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved--the final grouping of the race--the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.