belong to the educated classes, who are refined and cultivated, and who see the government about them falling into the hands of the unintelligent and often illiterate classes who are voted at the polls like sheep. Therefore these gentlemen weep aloud and wail and say: “If we had a limited suffrage, if we and our friends had the management of affairs, how much better things would be!”
Do not misunderstand me here. I am far from decrying the benefits of education. Nobody believes in its necessity more sincerely than I do. In fact I hold that, other things being equal, the educated man is immeasurably in advance of the uneducated one; but the trouble is that other things are often very far from being equal and it is utterly impossible for the average man, educated or not, to be trusted to decide with entire justice between himself and another person when their interests are equally involved. ....
The intelligent voter in a democratic community can not abdicate his responsibility without being punished. He is the natural leader, and if he refuses to fulfil his duties the leadership will inevitably fall into the hands of those who are unfitted for the high and holy task—and who is to blame? It is the educated men, the professional men, the men of wealth and culture, who are themselves responsible when things go wrong; and the refusal to acknowledge their responsibility will not release them from it. ....
The principle of universal suffrage, like every other high ideal, will not stand alone. It carries duties with it, duties which are imperative and which to shirk is filching benefits without rendering an equivalent. How dare a man plead his private ease or comfort as an excuse for neglecting his public duties? How dare the remonstrating women of Massachusetts declare that they fear the loss of privileges, one of which is the immunity from punishment for a misdemeanor committed in the husband’s presence? “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child ; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Throughout history all women and many men have been forced, so far as government has been concerned, to speak, think and understand as children. Now, for the first time, we are asking that the people, as a whole body, shall rise to their full stature and put away childish things.The sermon on Sunday afternoon was given by Mrs. Stetson from the topic which was to have been considered by the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, The Spiritual Significance of Democracy and Woman’s Relation to It. She spoke without notes and illustrated the central thought that love grows where people are brought together, and that they are brought together more in a democracy than in any other mode of living. ‘‘Women have advanced less rapidly than men because they have always been more isolated. They have been brought into relation with their own families only. It is men who have held the inter-human relation.
