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 housewife 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 extent and call for increased nervous activity. When a duty like
suffrage is added the change in her environment must necessarily be
marked and radical, with great demands for an 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 appearance, yet
they are exceedingly certain. The longer woman lived amid surroundings
calling for increased nervous expenditure, the greater would be the
effects of the accruing degeneration on her posterity. "Periods of
moral decadence in the life of a people are always contemporaneous with
times of effeminacy, sensuality, and luxury. These conditions can only
be conceived as occurring with increased demands on the nervous system,
which must meet these requirements. As a result of increase of
nervousness there is increase of sensuality, and since this leads to
excess among the masses it undermines the foundations of society--the
morality and purity 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 possession of which
she stands so far above man. I do not think that this ethical purity
would be lost in a day or a year, or a hundred years, for that matter;
yet there would come a time when the morality of to-day would be
utterly lost, and society would sink into some such state of existence
as we now find _en evidence_ among the Nairs. In support of this
proposition I have only to instance the doctrines promulgated by some of
the most advanced advocates of equal rights. The "free love" of some
advanced women, I take it, is but the free choice doctrine in vogue
among the Nairs and kindred races of people.

John Noyes, of the Oneida Community, where equal rights were observed,
preached the same doctrines. It is true that the pe