But here I am answered that it is not _men_ whom we have to fear so much as the bad of our own sex, who will rush to the polls while the good women will stay away. To this I have to say that I have never yet met a woman that I was afraid of, or from whom I feared contamination. In the theatre and concert and festival halls, the Fourth of July gatherings, in the cars, on the fair grounds, and any day upon the street or in the stores we meet and pass by the coarse, the frail, the fallen of our sex. They have the same right to God’s pure air and sunshine as we, and we could not deprive them of it if we would and would not if we could. I see not how these are going to harm us any more at the polls than at all these other places. The good women will vote as soon as the exercise of the right is granted them, and they will outnumber the bad more than a hundred to one. Instead then of the pure woman being contaminated, the vile woman will be awed and silenced in her presence, and led by her example into the right paths. Even those called low and vile have hearts that can be touched, and they will gladly seize the aid which the ballot and good women will bestow to raise themselves from the degraded condition into which bad men, bad laws and bad customs have plunged them. This objection, then, which assumes such proportions in the minds of many, looks very small when viewed in the light of truth and Christian charity. I think no man would consider it good reason for depriving him of rights because a bad man also enjoyed the same rights. This arguing that all women would go to the bad if allowed to vote because some women are bad now when none of them vote is the most absurd logic ever conceived in the brain of man, and if those who use it could see their silly reasoning in the light that sensible men and women see it there would be less of it. If the ballot makes people bad, if it is corrupting in its tendencies and destructive of virtue and goodness, then the sooner men are deprived of it the better. All men, good and bad, black and white, corrupt, debased, treacherous, criminal, may vote and make our laws, and we hear no word against it; but if one woman does or says aught that does not square with men’s ideas of what she should do and say, then she should not have the right of self-government, and all women everywhere must on that account be disfranchised and kept in subjection! Such reasoning might have answered once, but the intelligence of the present day rejects it, and women will not long be compelled to submit to its insults.