to prevent a hundred and ninety-four thousand other women who do want the ballot and who have an acknowledged right to it, and are laboring for it day and night, it is proper to ask, What business have Dolly Chandler and her little coterie to interpose? Nobody wants them to vote unless they themselves want to. They can stay at home and see nobody but the assessor, the tax-gatherer and the revenue collector, from Christmas to Christmas, if they so prefer. Those gentlemen they will be pretty likely to see, annually or quarterly, and to feel their power, too, if they have pockets with anything in them, in spite of all petitions to the legislature.
It did not occur to these women that by thus remonstrating they were doing just what they were protesting against. What is a vote? An expression of opinion or a desire as to governmental affairs, in the shape of a ballot. The "aspiring blood of Lancaster" should have mounted higher than this, since, if it really was the opinion of these remonstrants that woman cannot vote without becoming defiled, they should have kept themselves out of the legislature, should have kept their hands from petitioning and their thoughts from agitation on either side of the subject. Just such illogical reasoning on the woman suffrage question is often brought forward and passes for the profoundest wisdom and discreetest delicacy! The same arguments are used by the remonstrants of to-day, who are now fully organized and doing very efficient political work in opposing further political action by women. In their carriages, with footman and driver, they solicit names to their remonstrances. As a Boston newspaper says:
The anti-woman suffrage women get deeper and deeper into politics year by year in their determination to keep out of politics. By the time they triumph they will be the most accomplished politicians of the sex, and unable to stop writing to the papers, holding meetings, circulating remonstrances, any more than the suffrage sisterhood.
These persons, men and women, bring their whole force to bear before legislative committees at woman suffrage hearings, and use arguments that might have been excusable forty years ago. However this is merely a phase of the general movement and will work for good in the end. It can no more stop the progress of the reform than it can stop the revolution of the globe.
Political agitation on the woman suffrage question began in Massachusetts in 1870. A convention to discuss the feasibility of forming a woman suffrage political party was held in Boston, at which Julia Ward Howe presided, and Rev. Augusta Chapin offered
