REFORM DOES NOT COME BY THE BALLOT.
THAT you can not vote reform even by woman-suffrage is evident to all thinking reformers. True reform must come from within, the result of regenerating forces born of God. All other reform is but forming in different shape the same elements of evil. It has been thought by many good souls that the ballot to woman would remedy many of the wrongs and corruptions and evils of our national and municipal life. But it seems not to do this in cases where it has been tried. Below is what a Catholic priest, W. O. Ryan, pastor of St Leo's Church, Denver, has to say about its workings in Colorado, in the Kansas City Star of November 25:— "To say that female suffrage in Colorado has proved a failure, is to express a half truth, and a failure, after all, is but a negative term. Failures are oftentimes respectable; we can tolerate failures in things and persons.
"But the exercise of suffrage by women in Colorado is no longer tolerable; it is an unmixed evil, a horrible travesty on the hopes and expectations of many of us; a Frankenstein monster we have raised, which we must slay, or it slays us. It is injuring our homes; it is ruinous to all that is becoming and admirable in many of our women.
"I was one of the theorizers who voted for woman-suffrage. I imagined her entrance into the political arena would soften the combat and civilize the combatants; that her participation in politics would cleanse political ways; that the beetle-browed ward heeler, the saloon-keeper with a pull, the purchaser of fraudulent votes, would pass away as darkness when the dayspring arises. I believed that of course we should have a higher class of candidates for office, or that surely only a higher class could succeed, once woman-suffrage was obtained.
"All these hopes are with the things that were. Politics is the same old dirty game; the candidates are of the same mixed caliber; the ward heeler flourishes; the barkeeper with a pull is not extinguished; the repeater has still his innings.
"What good has woman-suffrage done?—Absolutely none. And from experience we find that it is incapable of good. It never can change the result of any election; for the daughter, mother, or sister votes as her father, husband, or brother votes. This is the rule—to which the exception is rare.
"In a large acquaintance, and I believe I know and speak to as many people as any man in Denver, I have met only few exceptions to that rule. In one case the woman voted from her family tradition; in the other, the women voted against their husbands' ideas, I believe, from natural perversity. And it is well the rule works; did it not, God help the divided homes.
"I see no good result from our eight years of woman-suffrage. We have a Sunday-closing and midnight-closing law for saloons. Surely here the woman vote should tell. Yet the fact is that most of our saloons are open on Sunday; many are open all night. And that abomination, 'the ladies' entrance,' greets one everywhere in Denver. Women suffer more than men from the gambling evil. Yet gambling is open and seemingly supported, or at least protected, by law in Denver.
"There is in Denver, as in all large cities, a 'red light' district. If the painted woman were confined there, so much the better for morality. She roams wide, however, and everywhere is herded to the polls; the semi-drunken harlot votes beside the respectable mother and sister.
"And the evil of woman-suffrage! For a month past hundreds of women have neglected their homes because of their interest in politics. Women's political clubs, under the name 'Bryan' or 'McKinley'—and doubtless both these gentlemen would be far from desiring their names to appear as an ægis for the woman in politics—female political orders, female political canvassing—God pity us, we have known the burden and woe of them all. It is our experience that where women have joined fortunes with a political party, because of their finer, more emotional nature, they have become the blindest partisans, and by their emotions are made absolutely destitute of principle in things political.
"Think of it, a woman buying other women to personate voters who had moved! Two such authentic cases came under my observation; and these women were otherwise reputed decent."