Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/187

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
POSTSCRIPT.
171

this authority, and appreciate the necessity of meeting them by the timely spread of radical conceptions of the State.

"It having already been sufficiently discussed in the pamphlet ‘What is True Democracy?', I refrain in this place from any further exposition of the fundamentally anti-democratic representative system, according to which the people surrender themselves powerlessly into the hands of executive as well as legislative representatives who are both irresponsible and, during their term of office, inaccessible. The essential requirement of a free people, on which all others depend, is universal suffrage, and this primary right is partly wanting entirely, and partly threatened where it exists.

"All reasons which are brought forward to justify departures from universal suffrage are only sham reasons. Not only the considerations of human rights, but even the considerations of expediency, admit of absolutely no exception. Logically conceived and carried out, exclusion from suffrage would have to mean exclusion from the State as well. A person without suffrage is an alien, while citizen and voter must be identical. Where the principle of equal rights is once departed from, there no longer any limit is to be drawn for disenfranchisement. If capacity is to decide, where then is incapacity to end? And who is to judge of capacity? But if even property is to be taken as a standard, is not the possessor thus by a two-