Anti-Suffragists Attacked.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

It is surprising to find intelligent persons opposing suffrage for women on the ground that it would mean doubling the complexity of government, with all the grave dangers of such a process, without securing the representation of any further interests.

Such persons assume that since the number of men approximates the number of women and since practically every women is the wife, daughter or sister of some man, the interests of every women are identical with those of her male proxy-elector.

Leaving out of discussion the fact that the eight-million women workers and the millions of women tax-prayers in the United States have especial interests which their proxies cannot, and do not, sufficiently protect, one may observe that this assumption is based upon a false conception of the theory of democratic government.

It is universally admitted that "government without the consent of the governed" is no longer practical in an enlightened community; and in a democracy universal suffrage is the result of the conviction that the interests of every citizen should be equally represented in government. What our anti-suffragist friends have failed to see is that elections are always expressions of opinions as to interests, both public and private, rather than an actual recording of such interests. If elections always determined the real interests of the majority we should never see corrupt and inefficient public officials, bad laws, and bad governments and disastrous policies. And if the vote were always the true recording of the individual's real interest, parties would be made up entirely of classes; and single groups, social economic and political, would always vote as units since their interests would be individual. However, there hardly seems to exist at present any such unanimity as to what to constitute the real interests of the majority of classes. The platforms and constituency of the great political parties are testimony to this.

The conclusion follows quickly enough: Since there exist wide differences in opinion between men with identical interests as to what those interests are and how they may be best protected, unless we deny intelligence to women we must accept it as inevitable that there may exist the same differences of opinion between men and women,--between father and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister. And unless we wish to contend further that women's opinions are inferior to men's we cannot but conclude that to confer the expression of opinion by the ballot exclusively upon the male sex is as absurd as it is unjust.

Let me conclude by a quotation from De Tocqueville:

"The most powerful, and perhaps the only, means which we still possess of interesting men in the welfare of their country is to make them partakers in the government."  LLOYD REILLY '17