stead the idea of a female justice
of the peace or township constable? For my part I want when I go to my
home--when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what
we call the prizes of this paltry world--I want to go back, not to be
received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but
to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman. I want to go
back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a
lecture upon finance or the tariff, or upon the construction of the
Constitution, I want those blessed, loving details of domestic life
and domestic love.

I have said I would not speak of the inconveniences to arise from
woman suffrage--I care not--whether the mother is called upon to
decide as a juryman or jury-woman rights of property or rights of
life, whilst her baby is "mewling and puking" in solitary confinement
at home. There are other considerations more important, and one of
them to my mind is insuperable. I speak now respecting women as a sex.
I believe that they are better than men, but I do not believe they are
adapted to the political work of this world. I do not believe that the
Great Intelligence ever intended them to invade the sphere of work
given to men, tearing down and destroying all the best influences for
which God has intended them.

The great evil in this country to-day is in emotional suffrage. The
great danger to-day is in excitable suffrage. If the voters of this
country could think always coolly, and if they could deliberate, if
they could go by judgment and not by passion, our institutions would
survive forever, eternal as the foundations of the continent itself;
but massed together, subject to the excitements of mobs and of these
terrible political contests that come upon us from year to year under
the autonomy of our Government, what would be the result if suffrage
were given to the women of the United States?

Women are essentially emotional. It is no disparagement to them they
are so. It is no more insulting to say that women are emotional than
to say that they are delicately constructed physically and unfitted to
become soldiers or workmen under the sterner, harder pursuits of life.

What we want in this country is to avoid emotional suffrage, and what
we need is to put more logic into public affairs and less feeling.
There are spheres in which feeling should be paramount. There are
kingdoms in which the heart should reign supreme. That k