buses righted. How any one can doubt this, who
watches the course of our politics, I do not see. In spite of the great
disadvantage of having masses of ignorant foreign voters to deal with,--and
of native black voters, who have been purposely kept in ignorance,--we
certainly see wrongs gradually righted, and the truth by degrees prevail.
Even the one great, exceptional case of New York city has been reached at
last; and the very extent of the evil has brought its own cure. Now, why
should this triumph of good over evil be practicable among men, and not
apply to women also?

It must be either because women, as a class, are worse than men,--which
will hardly be asserted,--or because, for some special reason, bad women
have an advantage over good women such as has no parallel in the other sex.
But I do not see how this can be. Let us consider.

It is certain that good women are not less faithful and conscientious than
good men. It is generally admitted that those most opposed to suffrage will
very soon, on being fully enfranchised, feel it their duty to vote. They
may at first misuse the right through ignorance, but they certainly will
not shirk it. It is this conscientious habit on which I rely without fear.
Never yet, when public duty required, have American women failed to meet
the emergency; and I am not afraid of it now. Moreover, when they are once
enfranchised and their votes are needed, all the men who now oppose or
ridicule the demand for suffrage will begin to help them to exercise it.
When the wives are once enfranchised, you may be sure that the husbands
will not neglect those of their own household: they will provide them with
ballots, vehicles, and policemen, and will contrive to make the
voting-places pleasanter than many parlors, and quieter than some churches.

On the other hand, it seems altogether probable that the very worst women,
so far from being ostentatious in their wickedness upon election day, will,
on the contrary, so disguise and conceal themselves as to deceive the very
elect, and, if it were possible, the very policemen. For whatever party
they may vote, they will contribute to make the voting-places as orderly as
railway stations. These covert ways are the very habit of their lives, at
least by daylight; and the women who have of late done the most conspicuous
and open mischief in our community have done it, not in their true
character as evil, but, on the contrary, under a mask of elevated