women should not inherit [or possess] them; but the
reason is at an end. As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal
them."

Under the feudal system it would have been absurd that women should hold
real estate, for the next armed warrior could dispossess her. By Gail
Hamilton's reasoning, it is equally absurd now: "One man is stronger than
one woman, and ten men are stronger than ten women; and the nineteen
millions of men in this country will subdue, capture, and execute or expel
the nineteen millions of women just as soon as they set about it." Very
well: why, then, do not all the landless men in a town unite, and take away
the landed property of all the women? Simply because we now live in
civilized society and under a reign of law; because those men's respect for
law is greater than their appetite for property; or, if you prefer, because
even those landless men know that their own interest lies, in the long-run,
on the side of law. It will be precisely the same with voting. When any
community is civilized up to the point of enfranchising women, it will be
civilized up to the point of sustaining their vote, as it now sustains
their property rights, by the whole material force of the community. When
the thing is once established, it will no more occur to anybody that a
woman's vote is powerless because she cannot fight, than it now occurs to
anybody that her title to real estate is invalidated by the same
circumstance.

Woman is in the world; she cannot be got rid of: she must be a serf or an
equal; there is no middle ground. We have outgrown the theory of serfdom in
a thousand ways, and may as well abandon the whole. Women have now a place
in society: their influence will be exerted, at any rate, in war and in
peace, legally or illegally; and it had better be exerted in direct,
legitimate, and responsible methods, than in ways that are dark, and by
tricks that have not even the merit of being plain.

DANGEROUS VOTERS

One of the few plausible objections brought against women's voting is this:
that it would demoralize the suffrage by letting in very dangerous voters;
that virtuous women would not vote, and vicious women would. It is a very
unfounded alarm.

For, in the first place, our institutions rest--if they have any basis at
all--on this principle, that good is stronger than evil, that the majority
of men really wish to vote rightly, and that only time and patience are
needed to get the worst a