PART V

The Greatest Foe of Woman Suffrage: The Organized Liquor Traffic

THE

By KATHARINE LENT STEVENSON

HE granting of the right of suffrage to the women of all lands where manhood suffrage now exists is the next step in social and political advance. No student of history can question the truth of this statement. As we trace the evolution of the human family through past ages, as we note the advancement of governments, the rise and fall of nations, we see that each permanent gain has carried with it enlargement of individual rights, wider participation in the functions of the state on the part of the many, more definite voice of the people in the making and enforcement of laws. When nations have begun the descent from their proud eminence as world factors, that descent has always been indicated by a lessening of the rights of the many and a corresponding increase of power and privilege on the part of the few.

We need not point to ancient Greece and Rome to prove these statements, although we all know that the mightiest days of these great nations were the days.

when largest power was vested in the people; that they began to decay when dictators wrested from the citizens their personal and political rights; when slaves increased and freemen lessened. The Anglo-Saxon race furnishes an illustration nearer home. What has marked every step of England's marvelously increasing power? Has it not been an extension of personal and political rights to more and more of her people? Of late years has it not been an extension of the right of suffrage, not because the ballot is in itself an end, but because the ballot has become largely the symbol of all that we mean when we speak of human liberty? From the days when the Barons wrested their great charter from the hands of a reluctant King, down to the days of the corn laws riots, every advance towards larger liberty on the part of the British nation has been signed and sealed by a fresh enlargement of Great Britain's voting list.

In our own country we know that the ballot was at first so hedged about by property qualifications as to be largely the right of a privileged class, but the dream of a government "of the people, for the people and by the people," has never been absent from the American nation. When the sixteenth amendment to our Federal constitution was passed manhood suffrage became the universal law of the land. With the exception of educational tests and tests of ancestry more recently devised in some sections of the country, every man who has reached the age of twenty-one is free to ex

press himself at the ballot box on the machinery of government under which he lives. Manhood suffrage, indeed, has gone rampant and many of the wisest and most farseeing of our nation believe that in a ballot restricted, not in the interests of class or race, but in the interests of knowledge as opposed to ignorance, righteousness as opposed to unrighteousness lies largely the solution of our present day problems.

Whether or not this be true it is not our province to discuss. The fact we wish to establish is that the ballot, whether considered as a tool for service or a weapon for defense, is now denied to one class only of American citizens and that class America's women. Is it not apparent to all who give the subject thoughtful consideration that the next logical advance step must be inevitably the extension to wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of that right to the ballot box which has been the sign manual of liberty and citizenship for husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons? He who fails to grasp this fact surely fails to read the signs of the times.

Opposing Forces

This advance of a great movement, this development of a new principle in government has not been allowed to pass unchallenged. The granting of the ballot to women has been relentlessly opposed by many forces

ignorance, conservatism, and a narrow range of vision being the chief unseen foes which have stood in the way of this, as of all other advance steps in