1895,] The Effect of Female Suffrage on Posterity. 823 
the chair of a circuit judge in one of our court-houses, and, be- 
fore taking her seat, remarked that there were those in her 
audience who doubtless thought “that she was guilty of pre- 
sumption and usurpation,” but that there would come a day 
when they would no longer think so. Statistics show clearly | 
and conclusively that there is an alarming increase of suicide 
and insanity among women, and I attribute this wholly to the 
already changed environment of our women. As the matter 
stands, they have already too much liberty. The restraining 
influences, which formerly made woman peculiarly a house- 
wife, have been, in a measure, removed, and woman mixes 
freely with the world. Any new duty added to woman as a 
member of society would modify her environment to some ex- 
tent and call for increased activity. When a duty like suffrage 
is added, the change in her environment must, necessarily, be 
marked and radical, with great demands for increased activity. 
The right of suffrage would, unquestionably, very materially 
change the environment of woman at the present time, and 
would entail new and additional desires and emotions which 
would be other and most exhausting draughts on her nervous 
organism. 
The effects of degeneration are slow in making their appear- 
ance, yet they are exceedingly certain. The longer woman 
lived amid surroundings calling for increased nervous expend- 
iture, the greater would be the effects of the accruing degener- 
ation on her posterity. “ Periods of moral decadence in the 
life of a people are always contemporaneous with times of 
effeminancy, sensuality and luxury. These conditions can 
only be conceived as occuring with increased demands on the 
nervous system, which must meet these requirements. As 
a result of increase of nervousness, there is increase of sen- 
suality, and, since this leads to excess among the masses, it 
undermines the foundations of society—the morality and pur- 
ity of family life” (Krafft-Ebing). The inherited psychical 
habitudes handed down through hundreds and thousands of 
years would prevent the immediate destruction of that ethical 
purity for which woman is noted, and in the posession of which 
she stands so far above man. I do not think that this ethical 
