THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

459

orities are shut out, the whole balance is overthrown, and party exercises a mischiev­ous influence.

Now some minorities believe that their particular reform will cure all evils. The woman suffragists fancy that if they have votes and use them they will moralize poli­tics. Will they? As soon as it is seen that the earnest, conscientious women have votes and use them, will not the party politicians, who are so eager to get ignorant aliens put on the rolls that they may use their votes for party victory, will not these induce all the women whom they could command, cajole or corrupt, to register as voters, and the result is that the votes for these interested men will be swelled by the votes of these women, and the adverse majority would be only the larger. Therefore,

I have said all along that the woman’s suffrage and proportional representation should go together, or the first will be a mere delusion.

The prohibition party believes and declares that universal abstinence from alco­hol in every shape will put an end to poverty. Will it do so? It is a question whether the whisky power would not be greater if the workmen could live on less and waste less. If he became a vegetarian and could maintain his family and himself for less money, unless economic conditions are altered, the result would be that wages would fall below their present level, and that the profits of capital and monopoly would be greater. It is partly because the English workman considers beer a necessary of life that his wages are at a higher level than on the Continent of Europe, and the temper­ate and vegetarian peoples of India and China are the worst paid laborers in the world.

I heard a lady at the Suffrage Congress say to and exhort all good men to come to the polls and vote, and she asserted that it was on account of their criminal abstention that politics were so corrupt. But if all the good men in America were to exercise the suffrage privilege, unless we get rid of the present party system, that is built on the duel between two parties, and two parties only in your separated districts, they might benefit themselves by doing the duty of citizens, but they would not moralize politics, for this reason, that if one hundred Democrats voted, and one hundred Repub­licans voted also, they would not change the situation. A few wavering and corrupti­ble voters could turn the scale, and thus virtually carry the district.

I believe I should have a vote, and expect in time to have it, but it would be little pleasure to me unless I can make it effective for the return of one man of whom I approve, without neutralizing the vote of any man who differs from me, or wasting the vote of anyone who agrees with me. It is by the exchange of the competitive for the co-operative spirit in politics that they can be sweetened, elevated and moralized, and by the method of voting which I shall show you as an object lesson, you will see that each vote has equal weight, and that all are effective. It is so simple that a child of eight years of age by merely reading the “ Instructions to Voters ” printed on the back of the ticket or ballot can tell the result. As you see by the ticket or ballot, all you have to do is to put “ I ” to the name of the candidate you prefer over all others, “ 2 ” to the name of the one next in preference, “ 3 ” to the next, and so on. So then if the candidate you prefer has too many votes or too few votes, your vote is passed on accordingly to the next, and is used and not wasted. Thus is the simple vote of Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill apprehended by a child. The quota needed by any one candidate for his return is found by dividing the whole number of votes polled in. the electoral district by the number of representatives needed. In the election for six poets to fill six vacant seats on Parnassus beside Apollo and the muses, the sixth part of this assembly who vote are entitled to carry in one, and not that half plus one should carry in all six, leaving the half minus one without any. This last is stupid injustice, but effective voting is justice, common sense and arithmetic.

All reformers should turn their eyes toward such methods of representation as would be just to the many and just to the few. At present outside parties are either lamentably weak or mischievously strong. They are powerless when they try to carry in an honest representation of their own opinions; they are strong when they sit on the fence and offer their votes to that one who offers the most advantageous terms.