728 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ture remains what it is. Men may grant women anything hut the 

 right to rule them, but there they draw the line. Is it not on 

 questions of rule that the wars of men are mostly fought, and will 

 men yield to the weak what they only surrender to irresistible 

 force ? In the settlement of all questions by force, women are 

 only in the way. 



The effect of sexual discord is bad on both sexes, but has its 

 greatest influence for evil through woman. While it does not re- 

 move her frailties it suppresses her distinctively feminine virtues. 

 This suppression, continued for a few generations, must end in 

 their greater or less abolition. The lower instincts would remain, 

 the flowers which blossom on that stem would wither. No matter 

 what their intellectuality might be, such women would produce a 

 race of moral barbarians, which would perish ultimately through 

 intestine strife. The highest interests and pleasures of the male 

 man are bound up in the effective preservation of the domestic 

 affections of his partner. Where these traits are weak, he should 

 use every effort to develop them by giving them healthy exercise. 

 As in all evolution, disuse ultimately ends in atrophy, and the 

 atrophy of the affections in woman is a disaster in direct propor- 

 tion to its extent. It may be replied again that woman suffrage 

 carries with it no such probable result. But I beliei^e that it does, 

 unless the relations of the sexes are to be reversed. But it will be 

 difficult to reduce the male man to the condition of the drone-bee 

 (although some men seem willing to fill that role) ; or of the male 

 spider, who is first a husband and then a meal for his spouse. 

 We have gone too far in the opposite direction for that. It will 

 be easier to produce a reversion to barbarism in both sexes by the 

 loss of their mutual mental hyperaesthesia. 



If women would gain anything with the suffrage that they 

 can not gain without it, one argument would exist in its favor to 

 the many against it ; but the cause of women has made great 

 progress without it, and will, I hope, continue to do so. Even in 

 the matter of obtaining greater facilities for divorce from drunken 

 or insane or brutal husbands than now exist in many States of 

 the Union, they can compel progress by agitation. A woman's 

 society, with this reform as its object, would obtain definite results. 

 The supposition that woman would improve the price of her labor 

 by legislation is not more reasonable than it is in the case of men, 

 who have to yield to the inexorable law of supply and demand. 



When we consider the losses that women would sustain with 

 the suffrage carried into effect hona fide, the reasons in its favor 

 dwindle out of sight. The first effect would be to render mar- 

 riage more undesirable to women than it is now. A premium 

 would be at once set on unmarried life for women, and the lie- 

 tcera would become a more important person to herself and to 



