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Show A POET ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE. John Boyle O'Reilly Calls it a Senti- mental Disease. - Boston Post. Dear Sib : You ask my opinion of woman wo-man suffrage. I cannot see why you distinctly mentioned "Roman Catholic and Protestant women." In the question ques-tion of voting, they are neither Catholics nor Protestants. I think woman suffrage is the dream of a spiritual realm unsuited to a course, material, masculine civilization. civiliza-tion. Women are better than men and , weaker. They ought to rule, but they can't. They would make ideal laws, and men would break them defiantly ; and the open trampling on law is anarchy and chaos, the issue of which would be again the rule of the strong. Women are better than men because they are spiritual, while men are intellectual. The spirit follows what is true and gentle and good ; thfk intftllftnt follows onlv what is Dleasant. successful, dominating, strong. If women could rule, civilization would be a poem. With men, it is a mixture of compromise, cruelty, and contrivance. In our present intellectual and spiritual condition, woman wo-man suffrage is a humbug, a hypocrisy, a sentimental disease. Women at present, or at least those who want to vote, are as unfit to vote as men are. They would degrade themselves by coming down to the commonplace level of the masculine motive. They would bind themselves to believe that the world can be bettered by political machinery instead of by social equity, by the patchwork of man instead of the order of God. I believe that some time in the future mankind will have a social order based on justice and not on expediency, in which the spiritual virtues of generosity, mercy, kindness, truth.and sacrifice snail De as puoiiciy respected as the intellectual virtues of shrewdness, selfishness, thrift, ambition, and boldness. bold-ness. And because I believe that woman is the spiritual reservoir of the human race, that her physical weakness is some time to be the true measure of manly tenderness, I dislike and detest a premature prema-ture movement that would cast away the highest power of woman and send her into in-to the ring to struggle muscle for muscle with the selfish, grasping, oaganizing, unjust, intellectual brute that civilization has made of man. I am respectfully yours, - John Boyle O'Reilly. |