AUSTRALIAN

Waipawa Mail, Volume X, Issue 1018, 4 December 1886, Page 3

AUSTRALIAN

[by ELECTRIC TEEEGHAITI —COPYRIGHT.] [IIEOTER’s TELEGRAMS.] Australian NewsMore Diggers Returned from Teetulpa. (Received December 4, 12.50 p.m.) MELBOURNE, December 4. The negotiations which have passed between the Government and the Telephone Exchange Company relative to the purchase of the Company’s business by the Government have been broken off. The Postmaster-General has announced that Government will establish a separate telephone Exchange. The Trades and Labor Council have rejected bv a large majority the motion proposed by its Secretary approving of the Exhibition to be held in 1888. ADELAIDE. December 4. Many diggers have returned hero from Teetulpa, owing to the shortness of water on the field. Women as Voters. TliE American correspondent of a contemporary writes : —A favorite argument of the promoters of woman suffrage in this country is that women, if voters, would throw the entire weight of their political influence on the side of prohibition. Washington Territory has just passed through a hot election on the question of the prohibition of the liquor traffic in many of its towns, on the local option principally. This territory has a population of over 100,000 and has over 20,000 female voters The result was divided. The largest towns voted against probibibition. Business considerations led merclinnts, bankers, and other men to vote against prohibition. The lower and lawless element, male and female, voted solidly against prohibition —the middle class, both male and female, voted for it. Two prominent women stumped the territory in the interest of free ruin. Whenever a majority of the males voted against prohibition a majority of the women voted the same way. In the country and smaller towns, when a majority of males voted for prohibition, the women voted the same way. The burning influence of the women voters proved to be a thing of the imagination. They were influenced by the same motives, ami moved by the same impulses, as their husbands and male friends, and so votod. Women arc not angels—they arc human beings after all. Another fact that will have some weight in the discussion of the women’s sufferage question is that though the right of women to practice law is conceded in fifteen States, two Territories, and in the District of Columbia, but forty-ciglit female lawyers are in business in the United States. This would indicate that lovely woman’s confidence in her powers of argument is mostly confined to cases where there is only one on the jury.