Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GENERAL DISCUSSION Chautauquan. 34: 482-4. February, 1902. Woman Suffrage in Colorado. William MacLeod Raine. Equal suffrage in Colorado cannot fairly be judged by facts accomplished; still less by the immoderate claims that have been made for it. It has not regenerated society nor abolished political corruption. It has not even prevented bloodshed at the polls and made the election of bad men impossible. The time-serving politician and the ward-heeler have not become ineligible for public preferment, nor has there been in any way a tremendous influence for good brought to bear upon the electorate. As a short cut to the millennium woman suffrage may be counted out as a failure, for even upon moral questions the line of political cleavage in the woman vote is as decided as among men. In point of fact the ship of state appears to sail on in much the same way as before. To the surprise of most people the extension of the suffrage proved an incident rather than an epoch. But the advocates of equal suffrage have a right to demand a patient and more than fitful trial. It may be justly claimed that if men have not been able to weed out the evils of our political life in thousands of years women should not be expected to do so in a decade. Moral values are not easily estimated, and centuries rather than years are .the measure of an advance in the social life. When Colorado was admitted as a state there was a provision in the constitution giving power to the general assembly to extend the suffrage to women, such action to take effect only when approved by a majority of voters ata general election. There was at that, time considerable agitation of the question, and at the general election the vote was more than two to one against the equal suffragists. From that time until the l...