Bellona Times
speaker
1,919 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 1 Aug
Bellona Times’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
in the first place the history of the nation has made democracy with us a moral instinct rather than a political doctrine it is beside the point to discuss the intellectual sanction of this instinct it is enough that the instinct is so deeply implanted in the national consciousness that even those persons and combinations of persons
who most outrage the principles of democracy and their conduct have not the effrontery to deny it in their speech that with what continental europe calls our anglo-saxon hypocrisy all of us talk respectively of the rights of the people no matter how we violate them this sense of democracy part of our heritage from our revolutionary forefathers
while it has endured throughout our national life has had moments of increased and moments of decreased vitality the present is one of the moments of increased vitality everywhere is the demand that the democracy we profess shall become real and that the people shall in fact be allowed to rule if the people in fact rule woman suffrage is inevitable
there can be no true democracy if one half of demos is paralyzed and helpless and unless we stultify ourselves and give the lie to all our history there can be no perfection of american political institutions
upon the lines of american development and american moral consciousness until all the american people are part of those political institutions free to function in them directly and powerfully instead of slowly and inefficiently by indirect influence
furthermore the moral sense of the nation is increasingly conscious of the inherent abstract injustice of its political attitude towards its women that one half of the population who must bear equally with the other half all the burdens of government its taxes direct and indirect who must equally conform to its edicts or pay the equal penalty for their violation
that this one half of the population can have no control or influence upon the creation or management of that government is inherently unjust.
Surely, if the philosophers and economists have left us permission to believe in any fundamental and natural rights, such rights must be violated by this discrimination.
but the most vital the most compelling because the most concrete reason for the interest of the awakened american citizen in woman suffrage lies in the large body of questions before him which have ceased to be entirely or even mainly economic and which have now become moral questions
and in the presence before him for solution of an even larger number of other questions dealing directly with that personal and individual morality which is the one field where from time immemorial woman's judgment and woman's instinct has been held to be of as sound and cogent a quality as man's
Women have been often in the past thought mentally or physically incapable of this or that effort, mentally or physically unworthy of this or that privilege.
They have never been thought inferior when it came to the vision of duty or to its performance.
Now the question of this vision of duty and its performance is increasingly becoming a factor in politics.
the american people have realized the significance of that pestilence which for lack of some more accurate name we call the white slave traffic and the moral and physical damnation wrought by it every year to thousands of men and women they have begun to realize the cost in human souls as well as bodies of letting little children work out their school time and their play time in factories
They have even begun to realize what happens when women are compelled to work for such hours and under such conditions as make it impossible for them to maintain decent homes and rear normal children.
they have to realize that when police officials take money for allowing gamblers to break the law and kill or connive at the killing of possible informers to stop their tails something else has happened besides a miscarriage of administrative efficiency
they have begun to realize when big business eliminates competition and reduces the cost of production that something else may have happened besides commendable business organization they have begun to realize that great simple and personal moral laws have been broken in these cases and that communities as well as persons may be criminals
It is no reflection upon the morality of men, nor upon their intelligence, that they are coming to see the great moral political questions.
The constructive value of much that they have already done, and that they are now trying to do upon these lines, is admitted.
Neither is it claimed that women will solve these problems at once, or that they could, unaided, do better at the solution than men have done.
Showing 141–160 of 1,919 · page 8 of 96
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