e precepts
and achievements of democracy and liberty which have made this century
what may be properly called the century of vindication.

Female suffrage is a reform demanded by the social conditions of our
times, by the high culture of woman, and by the aspiration of all
classes of society to organize and work for the interests they have
in common. We can not detain the celestial bodies in their course;
neither can we check any of those moral movements that gravitate with
irresistible force towards their center of attraction: Justice. The
moral world is governed by the same laws as the physical world, and
all the power of man being impotent to suppress a single molecule of
the spaces required for the gravitation of the universe, it is still
less able to prevent the generation of the ideas that take shape in the
mind and strive to attain to fruition in the field of life and reality.

It is an interesting phenomenon that whenever an attempt is made
to introduce a social reform, in accordance with modern ideas and
tendencies and in contradiction with old beliefs and prejudices,
there is never a lack of opposition, based on the maintenance of the
_statu quo_, which it is desired to preserve at any cost. As was to be
expected, the eternal calamity howlers and false prophets of evil raise
their fatidical voices on this present occasion, in protest against
female suffrage, invoking the sanctity of the home and the necessity
of perpetuating customs that have been observed for many years.

Frankly speaking, I have no patience with people who voice such
objections. If this country had not been one of the few privileged
places on our planet where the experiment of a sudden change of
institutions and ideals has been carried on most successfully,
without paralyzation or retrogression, disorganization or destruction,
I would say that the apprehension and fears of those who oppose this
innovation might be justified.

However, in less than a generation our country, shaken to its very
foundations by the great social upheavals known as revolutions,
has seen its old institutions crumble to pieces and other, entirely
new institutions rise in their place; it has seen theories, beliefs,
and codes of ethics, theretofore looked upon as immovable, give way
to different principles and methods based upon democracy and liberty,
and despite all those upheavals and changes which have brought about a
radical modification in its social and polit