I know a rich bachelor of large property who fatigues his friends by perpetual denunciations of everything American, and especially of universal suffrage.  He rarely votes; and I was much amazed, when the popular vote was to be taken on building an expensive schoolhouse, to see him go to the polls, and vote in the affirmative.  On being asked his reason, he explained that, while we labored under the calamity of universal (male) suffrage, he thought it best to mitigate its evils by educating the voters.  In short, he wished, as Mr. Lowe said in England when the last Reform Bill passed, “to prevail upon our future masters to learn their alphabets.”

These motives may not be generous; but the schoolhouses, when they are built, are just as useful.  Even girls get the benefit of them, though the long delay in many places before girls got their share came in part from the want of this obvious stimulus.  It is universal male suffrage that guarantees schoolhouse and school.  The most selfish man understands that argument:  “We must educate the masses, if it is only to keep them from our throats.”

But there is a wider way in which suffrage guarantees education.  At every election time political information is poured upon the whole voting community till it is deluged.  Presses run night and day to print newspaper extras; clerks sit up all night to send out congressional speeches; the most eloquent men in the community expound the most difficult matters to the ignorant.  Of course each party affords only its own point of view; but every man has a neighbor who is put under treatment by some other party, and who is constantly attacking all who will listen to his provoking and pestilent counter-statements.  All the common school education of the United States does not equal the education of election day; and as in some States elections are held very often, this popular university seems to be kept in session almost the whole year round.  The consequence is a remarkable average popular knowledge of political affairs,—­a training which American women now miss, but which will come to them with the ballot.

And in still another way there will be an education coming to woman from the right of suffrage.  It will come from her own sex, proceeding from highest to lowest.  We often hear it said that after enfranchisement the more educated women will not vote, while the ignorant will.  But Mrs. Howe admirably pointed out, at a Philadelphia convention, that the moment women have the ballot it will become the pressing duty of the more educated women, even in self-protection, to train the rest The very fact of the danger will be a stimulus to duty, with women, as it already is with men.