The argument for woman suffrage which bases it upon a fancied grouping of women with the vile and brainless element in the country, appears to me to be at once the weakest and the meanest of all. When the United States Government invited its woman citizens to share in making the Columbian Exposition the most wondrous pageant of any age, they responded from every town and hamlet by sending of their best. But the national Suffrage Association, as its official exhibit, gave a picture of the expressive face of Miss Willard surrounded by ideal heads of a pauper, an idiot, and a criminal, with a legend recording their belief that it was with these that American men placed American women. So false a picture must have taught the thoughtful gazers the opposite lesson from the one intended. It could have told them that the United States Government had at least guarded one trust with sacred care. The pauper was excluded from the ballot as not being worthy to share with freemen the honor of its defence. The unfortunate was excluded by an inscrutable decree of Providence. The criminal was excluded as being dangerous to society. The women were exempt from the ballot because it was for their special safety that a free ballot was to be exercised, from which the pauper and the criminal must be excluded. They were the ones who have given to social life its meaning and its moral, the ones who give to civic life its highest value. The authors of the "History" so often referred to, in answer to the claim that "government needs force behind it, and those who make the laws must execute them, and a woman could not be a sheriff or policeman," say: "Woman might not fill these offices as men do, but might far more effectively guard the morals of society and the sanitary conditions of our cities." A "moral guard" might be an excellent thing to ward off the ghosts in a country burying-ground, but would hardly prove effective against the riot of a Tammany mob on the night of an exciting election. It is absurd to speak in such fashion of work that is needed every hour. The crust of our civilization is very thin--how thin, the nation learned during the campaign just passed. Like a tempest from a clear sky, or one of their own cyclones, burst an influence from a portion of the West and South, that would have overturned the Government. Men struck fanatically and misguidedly at the integrity of the Supreme Court, at the power of the United States to hold jurisdiction over its own public affairs where they conflicted with State right, at the currency that gave the country ability to be honest at home and abroad, at the prosperity and honor of every citizen.