nting the New York Men's League for
Woman Suffrage, of which he was secretary, taking the broad subject
Democracy and Women, said in the course of his speech:

The democratic hypothesis is that a State is good not when it
conforms to some abstract eternal ideal of what a State ought to
be, as the Greeks thought, but when it conforms to the interests
of particular concrete individuals, namely, its citizens, all of
them that are in mental and moral health; and that the way to
find out their interests is not to sit on a throne or a bench and
think about it but to go and ask them.... Barring this question
of democracy, I think the political arguments for woman suffrage
are not the main ones. The great thing to my mind is not that
women will improve politics but that politics will develop women.
The political act, the nature it demands and the recognition it
attracts, will alter the character and status of women in society
to the benefit of themselves, their husbands, their children and
their homes. Upon this ground we can stand and declare that it is
of high and immediate importance to all humanity not only that we
give those women the vote who want it but that we rouse those who
do not know enough to want it to a better appreciation of the
great age in which they have the good fortune to live. Whatever
else we may say for the industrial era we can say this, that it
has made possible and actual the physical, social, moral and
intellectual emancipation of women....

The other day I had a letter from a man who said he wouldn't join
my society because he feared I was "striking a blow at the
family, which is the cornerstone of society." Well, I am not much
of an authority on matrimony but that sort of language sounds to
me like a hysterical outcry from a person whose family is already
tottering. It is at least certain that a great many of these
cornerstones of society are tottering, and why? Because there
dwell in them triviality and vacuity, which prepare the way of
the devil. Who can think that intellectual divergence,
disagreement upon great public questions, would disrupt a family
worth holding together? On the contrary, nothing save a community
of great interests--whether in agreement or disagreement--can
revive a fading romance. A high and equal comrades