nment and the individual is direct; all rights
are individual rights, all duties are individual duties.

"Government in its two highest functions is legislative and
judicial. By these powers the sovereignty prescribes the law and
directs its application to the vindication of rights and the
redress of wrongs. Conscience and intelligence are the only
forces which enter into the exercise of these primary and highest
functions of government. The remaining department is the
executive or administrative, and in all forms of government the
primary element of administration is force, but even in this
department conscience and intelligence are indispensable to its
direction.

"If, now, we are to decide who of our sixty millions of human
beings are, by virtue of their qualifications, to be the
law-making power, by what tests shall the selection be
determined? The suffrage is this great primary law-making power.
It is not the executive power. It is not founded upon force.
Never in the history of this or any other genuine republic has
the law-making power, whether in general elections or in the
framing of laws in legislative assemblies, been vested in
individuals by reason of their physical powers....

"The executive power of itself is a mere physical
instrumentality--an animal quality--and it is confided from
necessity to those who possess that quality, but always with
danger, except so far as wisdom and virtue control its exercise.
Therefore it is obvious that the greater the spiritual forces,
whether found in those who execute the law, or in the large body
by whom the suffrage is exercised, and who direct its execution,
the greater will be the safety and the surer will be the
happiness of the State.

"It is too late to question the intellectual and moral capacity
of woman to understand political issues and intelligently decide
them at the polls. Indeed the pretense is no longer advanced that
woman should not vote because of her mental or moral unfitness to
perform this legislative function; but the suffrage is denied to
her because she can neither hang criminals, suppress mobs nor
handle the enginery of war. We have already seen the untenable
nature of this assumption, because those who make it bestow the
suffrage upon very large classes