Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "Notwithstanding the repression of women's civil rights, and their absolute exclusion from even the dream of a political sphere, the women of France engage more freely than anywhere else in business and industry." There is a moral here deeper than can be read at a glance. The first thought suggested is, that industrial success for woman is not in the least dependent upon the vote. The second is, that industrial progress does not command the vote. The third is, that American freedom has worked in the opposite direction from French unstable republicanism. And the fourth is, that industrious France stands appalled at the lack of increase of its population. There are many forces that sap its national life, but perhaps the most conspicuous is the socialistic and anarchistic tendency of its labor organizations. The woman-suffrage idea was first openly proclaimed during the French Revolution. In 1851 the annual Suffrage Convention in this country was called by Paulina Wright Davis, to meet in Worcester, Mass. Ernestine Rose read to the convention two letters addressed to that body through her, written by Jeanne Deroine and Pauline Roland, from a Paris prison. During the revolutionary movements of 1848, these women had played conspicuous roles. One of them had attempted to nominate the mayor in her native city, the other to be a candidate for the Legislative Assembly. They wrote: "Sisters of America! Your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of the right of woman to civil and political equality. We have, moreover, the profound conviction that only by the power of association based on solidarity--by the union of the working-classes of both sexes in organized labor, can be acquired, completely and pacifically, the civil and political equality of woman, and the social right for all."
I know the feud, and the grounds for it, between socialism and anarchy. But both are enemies of the social order, and both are favorers of woman suffrage. How "pacifically" the labor movement that originated in France in 1848, and spread throughout Europe, was likely to proceed, we may judge by its constant outbreaks kindred to the recent bomb-throwing in Paris. In the German Working-man's Union, Hasenclever, for many years the leading socialist in the German Reichstag, said: "The Woman Question would be taken by the developed, or, more correctly speaking, the communistic state, under its own control, for in this state" (which was to consist of men and women with equal vote) "when the community bears the obligation of maintaining the children, and no private capital exists, the woman need no longer be chained to one man. The bond between the sexes will be merely a moral one, and if the characters do not harmonize could be dissolved." The "Social Democrat" of Copenhagen has for mottoes: "All men and women over twenty-one should vote." "There should be institutions for the proper bringing up of children." All the communistic and anarchistic labor organizations in Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and England proclaim woman suffrage as a prime factor, and the disruption of the family as its corollary.