From Woman in the Republic
By Helen Kendrick Johnson
Since this book was published the world has moved very rapidly, and the movement has bee strikingly in line with the course of events portrayed in the first edition. It was there said that woman suffrage was incompatible with sound republican government, and that it was allied to radical Socialism; it was shown that aristocratic tendencies and State Socialism were both favorable to woman suffrage; and these declarations have received fresh emphasis with the passing of time. Not one particle of progress has woman suffrage made anywhere in the world, except under one of both of these conditions, and usually it has come through an alliance with them. Socialistic paternalism finds its counterpart in aristocratic love of holding patronage. The same fact, that woman suffrage is incompatible with sound republican forms, is also to be seen in the defeats and setbacks that it has received in these passing years.
The United States has been startled lately by the sudden apparition of women who boastingly call themselves "militant Suffragists," and those who were not conversant with the beginnings of the movement during the French Revolution believed, erroneously, that they were witnessing a new thing under the sun. Woman Suffrage is the child of Rationalistic Communism, and the Suffragette is the natural exponent of that philosophy. At the Suffrage hearing at Albany in 1908 the element most in evidence was the Socialistic. From the Suffragist ranks came the cries: "Socialism is the Bible," "Socialism is religion." We have now a new and appalling phase of that movement which, in this country, in 1848, opened its batteries upon religion, upon government, upon the home.
Our recent visitor, Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, who came as an apostle of Socialism, on her return to England said she could see little hope for woman suffrage in America, except through Socialism. England is now torn in a struggle with that destructive force which wrecked the ancient republics, which delayed for seventy years the founding of a republic in France, and which now threatens every progressive constitutional monarchy. The latest program of English Socialist labor is set forth in a recent dispatch from London:
James R. MacDonald, M. P. for Leicester, will submit resolutions including demands for the special taxation of State-conferred monopolies, increased estate and legacy duties, and a substantial beginning of the taxation of land-values. Other resolutions, all conceived in the advanced Socialistic spirit, will be submitted, proving that the Social Democratic leaders are determined to persevere in their efforts to make every trade union a Socialistic body. These resolutions demand State insurance for workmen, the maintenance of school children, a universal seven-hour day, the nationalization of land, railways, mines and hospitals, a minimum universal wage of 30 shillings ($7.50) a week and a universal adult franchise for males and females.
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