In the year 1918 women were first granted complete suffrage by the great State of New York. The result has not been such as to surprise any thinking man, but it must have astonished the many credulous ones who expected political progress and reform from the fair hands of women, for it has been merely to strengthen the power of the bosses and political rings everywhere throughout the state. In New York City, where the dominant political machine is the Tammany Democratic organization, the Tammany vote which in 1917 under manhood suffrage was 314,000 sprang in 1918 to 547,000 and the Tammany majority was increased by over 100,000, reaching the high figure of 258,000. Fools build houses and wise men live in them. The female suffrage edifice, so toilfully erected day by day for the past fifty years by the feverish and ambitious hands of shrill-voiced lady agitators, is now occupied by the Tammany Ring, composed of hard-headed and experienced men. When they vacate the premises it will be to give place to a rival machine. True, it is, that women are now received into the political party fold; but as servants, not as masters. There is a female organization attachment, but it is strictly of the old orthodox Tammany brand; the vociferous new women are sent to the rear, their voices must not be too loud, there is no place in party ranks for skirted faddists, nor for women who want to lead in a “cause” or “movement.” Silence and discipline are the rules in machine organizations. Tammany and the New York Republican organization have had published a list of female associate leaders for each assembly district, about thirty-five in all. The names of great female uplifters, the leaders, as they foolishly thought themselves, are absent from these rolls, where may be read the names of those whose husbands and brothers will carefully transmit to them the orders from headquarters. Thus ends the pipe dream of the suffragette “leaders” that they would some day walk in, and take possession of the comfortable seats of the mighty. The arrogant conceit of a bunch of foolish women, who imagined themselves to be all-conquering, has received its quietus, and let us be grateful accordingly. Far better submit to the plunderings of the old rings, than to suffer from the antics and Bolshevism of the socialist suffragette combination.

Passing New York, where the evil results of woman suffrage are only just beginning to show themselves, let us look at Colorado, where it was adopted in 1892. In 1908 Helen Sumner went to that State to investigate the results of fifteen years of female voting. She was favorable to the cause and her inquisition was backed by women. The results were published by her in a book where she plainly endeavors to be impartial, notwithstanding her evident suffragette affiliations. In the hope of learning something of the moral effect of the franchise, she made thousands of inquiries, without eliciting anything favorable, except that voting made women take more interest in politics than before. Miss Sumner considered this an advantage and she puts it thus:

“Thousands vote; and to every one of these thousands the ballot means a little broadening in the outlook, a little glimpse of wider interest than pots and kettles, trivial scandal and bridge whist.” ... “A closer companionship and understanding between men and women.”

And so the government of the country must be entrusted to people whose chief interests in life are pots and kettles, scandal, and bridge whist. “Poor things,” muses Miss Sumner, “they are so lonesome, and they take no interest in cooking; let them vote, it will divert their minds.” Apparently she has no pity for the poor men folk, who must pay in high taxes and indigestion the price of this diversion. But why stop at this point; the merely going to vote will only give a woman a temporary jolt, scarcely equal to matching a ribbon at the store; why not give her something more exciting; why not pass a law permitting all women to practise medicine or to drive a locomotive, or to shoe horses? Only a comparatively few would suffer, and it would give the dear women “a little glimpse of wider interest.” Or to be fair to both sexes, why not let schoolboys vote; they too might like interesting “glimpses”; and they would thus become accustomed to talk politics with mamma and sister; never mind the harm to the country, it is big and long suffering. Now, when we consider that Miss Sumner is probably a very superior woman, and that as this extract shows, she has no idea whatever of the significance or dignity of the franchise, we may judge how far her less developed sisters are from being qualified for the exercise of the vote.

Let us consider for a moment what kind of “glimpses of interest and companionship” the Colorado women get by going into politics. Miss Sumner’s inquiries did not lead her to believe that woman’s morals were injured, or her affairs neglected as a consequence of the mere act of voting. Perhaps not; that large class of either very docile or shrewd women, who march to the polls with husband or father, vote as he directs, and quickly return with him, cannot be said to have suffered much direct harm in the process; nor indeed on the other hand to have got many “glimpses of wider interest.” And yet, what of the indirect results? Is it degrading or not to act a lie publicly and solemnly, to deliberately trifle with country and conscience, as one does by voting for people of whom he knows nothing, and for legislation which he does not thoroughly understand? Is it nothing to trifle with a weighty obligation? When a citizen goes to the polls and votes, does he, or does he not, in effect represent and declare, before God and his country, that he has investigated the matter, and that his ballot represents his solemn and true conviction? And if that declaration be false, if he has no solemn or true conviction on the subject, is he, or is he not, acting the part of a perjured rascal and traitor, and can his conscience pass through that ordeal unscathed? Here is food for thought for many a male voter and for nearly all the female voters.

Miss Sumner learned out there, some interesting particulars of the “broadening in the outlook” and the new “companionship” which Colorado women get from exercising the suffrage; and the experience must have astonished some of the decent ones among them till they got used to it. Her book fairly reeks with the tainted atmosphere of female corruption; the whole woman’s movement there was steeped in moral filth. Here are her own words (p. 258):

Among the first fruits of woman suffrage in Colorado seems to have been the development of a big batch of female criminals. In Arapahoe County in 1900 there were 5284 fraudulent registrations of voters of which 3512 were men and 1772 women. Seventeen hundred female criminals in one county! There must have been a considerable “broadening in the outlook” for women theretofore accustomed to decent homes; and a “closer companionship” with rogues, and understanding of their devices was no doubt arrived at. In fact Colorado has been said to be the most corrupt electorate in the United States. Of its effects there United States Judge Hailett, a resident of the state, said, “if it were to be done over again the people of Colorado would defeat woman suffrage by an overwhelming majority.” It stands because politicians are cowards and unscrupulous, and Colorado like other states is ruled by politicians. It has increased political corruption in the state. In 1905 about thirty men were sent to jail in Denver and fined, and in Pueblo there were 257 indictments, all for election frauds. It has not diminished political rowdyism. In an article in the Outlook in January 1906, Lawrence Lewis, who studied the subject for several years in Colorado, says that since woman suffrage went into effect, there has been a continuation of the former frauds, drunkenness, fights and arrests for crimes. Referring to the notorious election knaveries committed by both parties in November 1904, the second year of female voting, he says:

He further says, that in the cities such as Denver, Pueblo, etc., a great number of fallen women vote under the control of the bosses, often under compulsion.

Other similar instances are given by the writer in this same article. And he adds that:

Also this:

Only about one-third of the Colorado women actually vote, and a great many of them flatly and indignantly refuse to do so. Referring to an election in Colorado, 1910, Miss Seawell says:

Robert H. Fuller says that:

Miss Seawell says that in the election case of Bonynge vs. Shafroth, in the First Congressional District of Colorado, containing the City of Denver (Second Session of the Fifty-eighth Congress, H. R. report No. 2705), it appeared that out of 9000 ballots in the boxes there were 6000 fraudulent ones which had been prepared by three men and by one woman. One woman poll clerk voted three times; forgeries were committed by the women; two women arranged to have a fight started so as to distract the attention of the watchers at the polls, while a third woman stuffed the ballot-boxes. Because of this exposure, Shafroth resigned.

Moral stimulus there certainly could be none in contact with this fraud organization which goes by the name of politics in Colorado. Of mental stimulus and “broadening in the outlook” thus to be miraculously achieved by the mere process of selecting one out of two scamps for public office, Miss Sumner was reluctantly compelled to admit, that after all in actual result she found but little. Few people were able to give her any clear reason why they favored woman suffrage nor why they opposed it. It seems likely that all the mental stimulus the Colorado women ever got by entering the mire of politics, they could have obtained at less expense to their delicacy and good manners, by taking part in church fairs, golfing, gardening, playing base-ball, walking, lawn tennis, singing schools, literary societies, spelling bees, horseback riding or dancing. And if some of the precious creatures must at any rate be kept amused while the rest of us work, it would be less expensive to the state to provide these amusements at state charge than to permit them to divert their minds by playing with our national welfare, and using poor old Uncle Sam as the object on which to try their various experiments in political quackery.

Glancing over the New York Evening Post of August 27, 1919, the writer was interested to read that a young lady politician, convicted in 1916 of a murder during a political quarrel at Thompson Falls, the victim being one Thomas, also a politician, had been paroled from the Montana State Penitentiary. It is reassuring to know that a suffragette murderess actually risks three years confinement (softened no doubt by sympathy) in Montana, the first woman suffrage state, and the one who gave us our first lady “congressman.”

The plain truth is, that the entry of women into politics has brought no promise to the American people of any practical help in any of their real problems. The whole movement bears the stamp of crudeness and mediocrity. Its ideals and operations have been low and its leaders lacking in every quality of greatness. Part of its success is no doubt due to the love of novelty, and the inability in most minds to distinguish what is really progress from what is merely blind or foolish experiment. To many superficial people there is a fascination attached to everything which smacks of revolution; because in the past an occasional revolt has been justified, they think it is heroic and noble to take part in any political rumpus. But nothing either noble or heroic was ever in or behind the woman suffrage movement, or has ever come out of it. The really great political agitations have all produced something worth while, in orators, leaders or authorship; see, for example, the chronicles of the American Revolution or the abolition movement; even the French Revolution, in its compass from Rousseau to Napoleon, evolved some greatness to offset the mass of rubbish and infamy which it vomited forth. Its political incapables though unfit for any good constructive work were at least able to talk and write with effect; they drew attractive political pictures and proposals, and could promise and speculate in a way to arouse interest. Not so the suffragists. Among political agitators they stand supreme for dullness and stupidity. Looking at their literature one is immediately struck by its cheapness, by its utter lack of noble and patriotic sentiments, by the lack of appeal to broad and elevating motives. We have had thousands of suffragist speeches, and tons of printed literature, and after all, what have they or what has their movement offered to the nation or to the world? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The movement has not produced one idea worthy of the consideration of a well-educated and sensible man; it has apparently been motived by vanity, love of notoriety and power, and characterized by hysteria; the proposals advanced have been pilfered from socialists and other fanatics; the oratory and literature of the suffragists is characterized by flippant insincerity and unscrupulousness; progressive legislation in which they had no perceptible part is boldly claimed as their work; their leaders often display dense ignorance of the political history of the country, and a sad lack of capacity to understand sound political principles or to sympathize with anything beyond the popular smartness of the hour. The personnel of their leaders has been commonplace and uninteresting. Some of them have been sincere fanatics; most of them are political adventuresses. Dr. C. L. Dana says of the movement: “It is adopted as a kind of religion, a holy cult of self and sex, expressed by a passion to get what they want. There is no program, no promise, only ecstatic assertions that they ought to have it and must have it, and of the wonders that will follow its possession.... Measured by fair rules of intelligence testing, I should say that the average zealot in the cause has about the mental age of eleven.” (Letter to Miss Chittenden.) During the war with Germany the patriotism of many of the leaders was doubtful, and their associates suspicious. And during the progress of the whole agitation, there has been no suggestion of any effort to be made by those women or their followers to stop political graft or corruption, or to raise the standard of politics or of legislation. They have had the vote at two annual elections in the great state of New York; what do they offer there? Nothing. Who are their standard bearers and who has benefited by their vote? The most notorious boss and the most noted and powerful political machine in the world.

The strongest proof, however, of the utter unworthiness of the cause of female suffrage and the meanness of its motives is furnished by the public declarations of its female advocates. Many of these addresses are flavored with half contemptuous, half vicious and altogether impudent and vile sneers at men, and assertions of masculine inferiority, which could not have been readily displayed but by those familiar with households whose men habitually receive at home but scant respect. Those scoffs at men are accompanied by a great show of half hysterical, all gushing, admiration for the mystic excellences of contemporary women, and of contempt for those of the last generation; in fact these female reform leaders usually assume a top-lofty attitude of disdain for our ancestors generally, their work and their ideals. Each of them is of course filled with wonder at her own superior wisdom. One cannot help suspecting that most of this display of crudity and egotism is due to the fact that much of the suffragist work was done by newly fledged graduates of female colleges, where uppish young women, largely of the type who dislike home duties, or sometimes it is feared work of any kind, are sent by their parents either to get rid of them for a while, or because it is the thing to do, or to fit them for teaching. As from the college president down, nothing of actual life is known, or ever was known, within the college walls, where everything needed, buildings, endowments, salaries, books, instruments and sustenance, is provided by someone else, one can readily imagine the quality of the stuff expounded in these places under the pretence of instruction in sociology, politics and economics, and greedily swallowed by the extremely silly and conceited undergraduates. On leaving college, the best or most fortunate of these girls, aided by good luck or guided by wise parents, go to work at some useful occupation, and begin to get real lessons in life followed usually by still higher instruction as wives and mothers later on. Of the lazy, rattle-brained, and otherwise good for nothing, a certain percentage find their way every year into the field of female suffrage agitation. Some scraps of knowledge they have picked up in the class-room, the value of which they enormously exaggerate in their own minds, and give themselves intellectual airs in consequence. Many of them lack sense or judgment sufficient to enable them to appreciate the immense importance of the business world, the great mental capacity required in dealing with problems of commerce, manufacturing and finance, and feel a certain contempt for business people who take no part in the literary and artistic patter of the day, or who lack taste for trashy new poetry and rubbishy modern novels. The participation of this class in the “movement” is prompted partly by morbid desire to associate with men; and partly by vanity and a longing for notoriety, and for opportunity to display their own imagined powers. Fools, being afraid of no social or political problems, walk in where angels fear to tread; and it is no unusual thing to see charming and prudent women reduced to meek silence by these female blatherskites, with their irrelevant harangues about primitive men, cave dwellers, man-made law, dual-sexed insects and female spiders who devour their mates. If the reader doubts that such have been of the class of female suffrage deliverances it will be because he has been fortunate enough not to have heard many of them.

Part of the success of the woman suffrage agitation is due to the use of money. Just as the accumulations of the rich are often poured by their sons into channels of profligate folly, so by their widows and daughters they are often turned into ditches of political folly. In countries like England and the United States, where large and small fortunes are constantly being accumulated by hard-working men, and large portions thereof bequeathed to female relatives, there will always be found a certain proportion of the latter who lack the wisdom to properly use their surplus cash; some waste it shamefully; some lose it to sharpers; some bestow it upon worthless and sham benevolences; some squander it to gain notoriety. One can scarcely imagine any “cause” or “movement” so absurd that, people cannot be found to believe in it, or to pretend to do so, and to subscribe to it if properly approached and tempted by visions of celebrity. For the woman suffrage agitation sums aggregating very considerable have been thus secured in England and America. With this cash a number of poorer women can be employed to do propaganda work and to perpetrate acts of lawlessness. In England they assaulted cabinet officials and others; they used dynamite, they smashed windows, they broke up public meetings by violence, they practised rowdyism and blackguardism, they attempted even murder. Here, they have allied themselves with anarchists and socialists, enemies of the republic; they have lawlessly interrupted public meetings; they publicly affronted the President at the Arlington Hotel on April 15th, 1910, a thing never before done in the history of the country; and they subsequently insulted another President, by picketing the White House in an offensive manner for weeks together. They justify this by saying that they were in earnest, and ready to suffer for the cause; and the same has been said by other fanatical criminals. Their course has been such as would have discredited even a good cause in any field but that of politics, where vile and dastardly methods are customary and considered appropriate.

Up to a few years ago the politicians were accustomed to ridicule the woman suffrage agitation, and for years made it a standing joke at the various state capitols; thus it was formerly the well known practice of the New York state legislators to deceive and humbug the woman suffrage managers by passing one of their measures in one house, with the understanding that it would be defeated in the other. But as soon as the movement began to make real headway, the politicians began to favor it, seeing the chance of advantage to themselves from that course. The only opinion those gentry fear or respect is that backed by organized force or easy money. The suffragists organized and raised immense amounts of cash; their opponents failed to do either and almost ignored the movement. Now, reasoned the politicians, should the suffrage proposals fail nothing will be lost by having supported them; and should they succeed we will have a still more credulous, corrupt and easily managed constituency than before, and may hope for the gratitude and friendship of the suffrage leaders. And now that in sixteen states women have the vote, the politicians on both sides strongly favor woman suffrage, and are one and all ready to swear everlasting devotion to the cause of woman. The presidential aspirants dare no longer oppose it. So that judging the future by the past, the cause of woman suffrage has a fair chance of winning in all or most of the states of the Union. It certainly will do so unless there be a strong organized effort to defeat its progress, of which at present no signs are visible. In the political world the most powerful forces are money and fanaticism. The effect of money is familiar to us all every day. The effect of fanaticism is equally familiar to readers of history. It produced the Mohammedan Empire, the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, and assisted in the downfall of Spain; it furthered the Mormon political sway; the violent abolition of slavery; the prohibition movement; the woman suffrage agitation and Bolshevism. That female suffrage is the last important step in the downward march of the American democracy is the belief of the writer of this book. If at this point the reaction does not begin, the democratic rÉgime in this country is doomed to final failure, and even to possible overthrow at the hands of red radicalism.