will both be apt to go home in a bad humor, and there will not be
much happiness in a family during the remainder of the day which
follows such a scene. And while they are both out what will
become of the children? Are they to take care of themselves?

What rights can women expect to have that they do not have now?
They are clothed with the protection of law.[477] In my judgment,
Mr. President, the day that the floodgate of female suffrage is
opened upon this country, the social organism will have reached
the point at which decay and ruin begin.... Why, sir, what is the
advantage? If the head of the family votes he is apt to reflect
the views of the family. It is more convenient than to have all
the family going out to vote.

Wilbur F. Sanders of Montana interrupted Senator Reagan to ask if the
law should not be an expression of the intellectual and moral sense of
all the people, and whether governments did not derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed.

John T. Morgan of Alabama entered into a long and sarcastic argument
to prove that if a woman could vote in Wyoming she might be sent to
Congress and then she could not be admitted because the law says a
senator or representative "must be an inhabitant of the State in which
_he_ is chosen." He ignored the fact that all legal papers are made
out with this pronoun, which presents no difficulty in their
application to women.

Henry B. Payne of Ohio said that he was not in favor of woman
suffrage, and that no woman in England ever had been permitted to
exercise the elective franchise. (Women then had been voting in
England for twenty-one years, the same length of time as in Wyoming.)
He asked, however, if these little technical objections would not be
more than overcome by the moral influence that a woman Representative
might exert in the committee rooms and on the floor of the House.

Mr. Morgan at once launched forth into a panegyric on the moral
influence of woman which certainly demonstrated that if sentimentalism
were a bar to voting, as Senators Vest and Reagan had insisted it
should be, the senator from Alabama would have to be disfranchised.
Part of it ran as follows:

It is not the moral influence of woman upon the ballot that I am
objecting to, and it is not to get rid of that or to silence or
destroy such influence that I oppose it, but it is the immoral
influenc