give men and women shareholders a vote upon the same basis, and one fails to see why a government, which professedly exists to maintain the rights of the people, should practice in its own dealing such flaunting injustice. ....
Women help to support every public institution in the State and should have representation upon every board, and in the laws which control them. They help to pay the army pensions and should be allowed to help in deciding how much shall be paid. They help to pay for standing armies and for navies and they have the larger part in the nurture and training of every man who is in army or navy, and this is not the smaller part of the tax, since it is at times the matter of a life for a life. Women pay their part of the taxes to support our public schools and have intense interests in their well-doing. Twenty-six States have recognized this fact and have given to women some kind of School Suffrage, one has granted Municipal Suffrage and four Full Political Equality; but this is only a fraction of the justice which belongs to a government founded by statesmen whose watchword was, "No taxation without representation."Miss Elizabeth Burrill Curtis (N. Y.) answered the question, Are Women Represented in our Government?
That a century ago the latter were not thought of as having any rights under this motto is not surprising. So few women then held property in their own name that the injustice done them was not sO apparent. But the situation is changed now, and the right of women to be considered as individuals is everywhere acknowledged save in this one particular. Even those who feel that the granting of universal male suffrage was a mistake, and that the right to self-government should be proved by some test, educational or otherwise—even those do not assert that it would be anything but gross injustice to tax men without allowing them a voice in the disposal of their money. ....
But there is still another side to the question. It is not only that the disfranchised women are unfairly treated, but the public good inevitably suffers from the political nonexistence of half the citizens of the republic. Either women are interested in politics or they are not. If the former, the country is distinctly injured, for nothing is more fatal to good government than the intermeddling of a large body of people who have never studied the questions at issue and whose only interest is a personal one. If, on the other hand, women are not interested in politics, what is the condition of that country, half of whose citizens do not care whether it be well or ill governed? That women influence men is never denied, even by the most strenuous opponents of woman suffrage. It is, on the contrary, most
