The Suffragists' Folly.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 11, 1912:
In Sacrificing Themselves on the Altar of the Bull Moose God.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
    According to all accounts, a new combination of Rs convened at Chicago recently. This time it was Rooseveltism, Rabidness, and Religion. A queer mixture, truly, but one which menaces nothing so much as the future of the woman suffrage cause.
    If women of the emotional sort, who attended the Bull Moose "camp meeting," expect to be given the ballot in the near future, they have reckoned without knowledge of evolutionary processes. That relic of religious persecution, the prayer before political bodies, is enough for chagrin; but the hymn singing, the amens, and hallelujahs of political fanatics is beyond toleration. Intelligent flesh and blood must draw a line somewhere, and if we are expected to accept a party's god along with its nominee it were better to be done with statesmanship altogether, and leave the Administration to the fishes.
    Emotional woman has been tested in the recent convention, and though she has seen her counterpart in emotional man, the two forms of nervousness are widely divergent, one being a spasm of the brain and the other of the pocket. If women who desire the ballot will recall that this is the twentieth century, and not the day when Christian martyrs were fed to animals, it will be better for the general welfare of the entire suffrage party. The Bull Moose god must be fed, but let him prey upon politicians or his own variety. The success of woman suffrage demands no such sacrifice.
                    LURANA SHELDON.
    New York, Aug. 9, 1912.