31
matter of "Woman's Rights" will speedily eventuate in the most prolific source of her wrongs. She will become rapidly unsexed, and degraded from her present exalted position to the level of man, without his advantages; she will cease to be the gentle mother, and become the Amazonian brawler.
While it is difficult to see how any single abuse could be reformed, it is easy to imagine how very many would be created by the "political enfranchisement and eligibility of woman." It would most assuredly introduce a new and alarming element of discord into the family circle, already weakened, well-nigh ruined, by the singular customs of the time.
The tendency to isolation has been ably commented on by a recent writer as the greatest danger to American society; the living in hotels and boarding-houses, and the "loss of the restraining and purif3dng associations that gathered around the old homestead." What remains of the family is only held together by the graces and virtues of woman; and the facility of obtaining divorces is fast breaking down even this last hope. The same writer truly says, that "when the family goes, the nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving."
We cannot imagine how men can be reformed by investing woman with the ballot, but we can readily believe that many women would thereby become debased. The chivalric veneration with which man now regards woman, arises from the distance, as well as the difference, between them; in fact, from the advantages she possesses as woman. This would vanish with her political equality, for he would then be in perpetual and open strife and rivalry against her; whether as a political enemy or political ally, the distinctions of sex will be forgotten, and she will lose that respect
