ghteen
years as the commencement of the term of presumed fitness for
military service and forty-five as the period of its termination;
while the age of presumed fitness for the suffrage, which
requires no physical superiority certainly, is set at twenty-one
years when still greater strength of body has been attained than
at the period when liability to the dangers and hardships of war
begins. There are at least three million more male voters in our
country than of the population liable by law to the performance
of military duty. It is still further to be observed that the
right of suffrage continues as long as the mind lasts, while
ordinary liability to military service ceases at a period when
the physical powers, though still strong, are beginning to wane.
The truth is that there is no legal or natural connection between
the liability to fight and the right to vote.

The right to fight may be exercised voluntarily, or the liability
to fight may be enforced by the community, whenever there is need
for it, and the extent to which the physical forces of society
may be called upon in self-defense or in justifiable revolution
is measured not by age or sex, but by necessity, which may go so
far as to call into the field old men and women and the last
vestige of physical force. It can not be claimed that woman has
no right to vote because she is not liable to fight, for she is
so liable, and the freest government on the face of the earth has
the reserved power under the call of necessity to place her in
the forefront of the battle itself; and more than this, woman has
the right, and often has exercised it, to go there. If any one
could question the existence of this reserved power to call woman
to the common defense, either in the hospital or the field, it
would be woman herself, who has been deprived of participation in
the Government and in shaping public policies which have resulted
in dire emergency to the State. But in all times, and under all
forms of government and of social existence, woman has given her
body and her soul to the common defense.

The qualification of age, then, is imposed for the purpose of
securing mental and moral fitness for the suffrage on the part of
those who exercise it. It has no relation to the possession of
p