"Prove All Things."

White Ribbon, Volume 10, Issue 115, 15 February 1905, Page 4

"Prove All Things."

In these days of many books and more periodicals, it is not seldom desirable to pause, asking oneself the question which Philip of old was inspired to put to the officer of Queen Candace as he overtook him reading in his chariot: “ Understandest thou what thou readest ? ” And it is more than desirable, it is absolutely necessary—amid all the babel of tongues—as St. Paul admonishes, to “ Prove all things.” The November number of the Nineteenth Century and After contains an article, “ The Check to Woman’s Suffrage,” by Mr Frank Foxcroft, which either for sheer audacity or for sheer ignorance or facts it would be hard to beat. Mrs Wolstenholme Elmy, Mrs R. F. Swiney, and others, have brought a cloud of witnesses to the English press towards the extinction of Mr Foxcroft’s views; views, it may be, which still lurk in the hidden corners of our own Colony, and which cannot be too strenuously disproved. As Mrs Swiney says, “ We have only to demolish the same old array of ‘facts,’ no new arguments are advanced, but all along the line the ‘Antis’ give themselves away with a fatuous inconsequence, which speaks little for their veracity or their logic. As the question of Woman Suffrage in this country (England) is developing from the academic stage to the practical, it need not surprise a student of human nature to find many bogus figure-heads put up to terrify the nervous male elector, and to bias the undecided legislator as to the expediency, apart from justice, of making any innovation in the existing order of this best of all possible constitutional Governments. We, therefore, find such

organs of the press as the Nineteenth Century and After , and others of like ilk, that have always systematically sneered at and discountenanced any reform in the status of women, raking up from every quarter so-called evidence against the desirability of Englishmen, at last, in this twentieth century of Christian civilisation, giving back to their fellow sister-citizens an ancient right, unjustly “taken from them in 1832.” Mrs Swiney then takes Mr Koxcrott’s “arguments” seriatim and reduces them to powder. She does not find it hard to show that these antisuffrage women of America are the foolish, undeveloped society dolls, caught by masculine claptrap, and hacked by men, who “ have told women that it is best for them to hold no property, tor the mother to have no claim to her chi'd, for the wife to be the slave of the husband, for women to remain within the sphere ordained by man for her. . . These are the true anti-suflfragists; the powers of evil with which the supporters of the right have to contend. In the equal suffrage states reforms that take away from most of them the means of living have been carried by the woman vote : such as the abolition of saloons and houses of ill-fame, the iniquities of child labour, the unfair discrimination between the wage of men and women, the neglect of the child criminal, the insane and the epileptic, the extravagance and waste of municipal expenditure, the bribery and corruption of official elections. All these are so many Nails in the Coffin of the powers that have been in the ascendency throughout America, and it is not to be wondered at that the supporters of these maleficent conditions should move heaven and earth to discredit the woman movement, and delay the day of woman’s political emancipation. Again, Mrs Elmer Wigon, chairman of the Woman’s Republican Club, in Colerado, told an interviewer that “ our strong opponents are the machine politicians, who cannot manipulate the woman’s vote as they expected to do ; foreigners, who look upon women as inferiors ; and, above all, the liquor-dealers. Everywhere they are the most active of our enemies, because they have the money with which to buy the legislatures. This they did in California, and the Statt of Washington.’’ So much for the value ot Mr Tox-

croft’s article in the Nineteenth Century and After. Let us enquire for one moment if all this has any bearing on the position of

Our Own New Zealand Selves. We do not hold the suffrage on the same terms as do men. These emancipated American women do, and that is what is now promised our English sisters. We have done enough to earn the hatred, or, at least, the merciless opposition of just those classes of men of whom we have been reading in America, but we fight with a bladeless weapon, and our efforts will be all in vain if we consent to carry on the childish fiasco. The moral I would point out then is, let us be firm in our determination to attain equal suffrage with men. Then will it follow, as day follows night, that we shall be able to do for our dear little colonial home what the women of at least four American States have been able to do for theirs. We do not say that the emancipation of women will bring the millenium, but it will help us fai on in the path of betterment. Another thing, women are not doing all they might in the matter of embracing opportunities of public usefulness now open to them. Let this year see a much larger number of women presenting themselves for election to our school boards and committees, even to our City and County Councils, our Licensing Committees and Charitanle Aid Boards. It is those who have been

“ faithful in a very little ” who shall have “ authority over ten cities.” M. H. S.