Certainly the devil must have invented petticoats.  After EVE had finished up that little apple job, she went into the petticoat business, and—­hence all our tears.  Instantly petticoat government became a possibility.  Then, as her daughters became wiser, they invented the weeping business, the swooning business, and the curtain lecture business; they went for our pocket-books and they got them, and petticoat government became a probability.  Not satisfied with the pocket-books, they are now going for the business by means of which we fill the books, and oh, what a hankering they have for public pap!  They stick to the curtain lecture business, but now they do it before the curtain.  Alas, petticoat government is now a certainty!

It’s all very well for you to talk about the grandeur of the governments of BOADICEA, and ELIZABETH and CATHERINE, but I don’t believe that BOA, or LIZZY, or KATE would have been very nice as a companion, if she and you were sitting before the fire, and she wanted stamps and was going for them as a matter of business.  Besides, there was only one of them at a time, and they didn’t trouble common people much, but in this enlightened nineteenth century I have seen a poor, miserable, six foot dry-goods clerk turned out of a retail store by a strapping little female, who couldn’t jump a counter worth shucks.  I have seen him in his misery industriously study “What I Know About Farming,” squat on a farm in the West, and bring himself, his wife, and four miserable offshoots to the alms-house by endeavoring to apply the rules set down in “What I Know About Farming” to 160 acres of land.  I have seen the poor, half-paid type-setters strike for their altars, their sires, and more wages, and I have seen a troop of petticoats, with gal children inside them, trot into the type-setter’s place, so that the miserable compositors were compelled to return and starve on four or five dollars a day.  That’s petticoat government with a vengeance.  Putting your nose to the grindstone isn’t nice at any time, but it’s awful when the gal children turn.

But that is only the beginning.  They have struck for bigger things.  In the expressive language of the immortal JOHNNY MILTON, they are going for the whole hog.  They want to vote; some of them have been caught repeating already; they want to sit on juries, and they want to go to Congress.  Heaven forbid that any of them should ever reach the House of Representatives!  Imagine the size of the Congressional Globe if we should send women there!  Why, there would be as great a dearth of paper in Washington as there is now in Paris.  They want to shave you, dress you, doctor you into your coffins, preach a funeral discourse over your remains, and then take your will into the Surrogate’s Court and fight over the little property they have left you.

They say all this means that they are our equals, and intend to show it.  Listen.  In a town some hundreds of miles distant there is a law firm whose sign reads thus: