Reform of evil conditions does not come from below; leaders with visions of the future must point the way.  I once heard of a very respectable lady of Boston who exclaimed indignantly against certain proposed changes in child labour laws in North Carolina, where she owned shares in a cotton mill.  She maintained that the children who worked at the looms ten hours a day expressed no discontent; it kept them off the streets; and the operators, in the kindness of their hearts, had actually had the looms made especially to accommodate conveniently the diminutive size of the little workers.  Some people might, with great profit to themselves, read Plato’s superb allegory of the men in the cave.

The fact that various women’s associations have been instituted in opposition to the extension of woman suffrage—­as in Boston and New York—­is no argument for depriving all women of the franchise.  If the women who compose these societies do not care to vote, they do not need to; but they have no right to deprive of their rights those who do so desire.  It is said that good women will not go to the polls; yet there are in every large city hundreds of respectable males who disdain to vote.  A woman is more likely to have a sense of duty to vote than a man.  It is the old cry, “Don’t disturb the old order of things.  If you make us think for ourselves, we shall be so unhappy.”  So Galileo was brought to trial, so Anne Hutchinson was banished; and so persecuted they the prophets before them.

IV.  Another argument that is made much of is the intellectual inferiority of woman.  For ages women were allowed nor higher education than reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, often not even these; yet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Jane Austen, and some scores of others did work which showed them to be the peers of any minds of their day.  And if no woman can justly claim to have attained an eminence such as that of Shakespeare in letters or of Darwin in science, we may question whether Shakespeare would have been Shakespeare or Darwin Darwin if the society which surrounded them had insisted that it was a sin for them to use their minds and that they should not presume to meddle with knowledge.  When a girl for the first time in America took a public examination in geometry, in 1829, men wagged their heads gravely and prophesied the speedy dissolution of family and state.

To the list of women whose service for their fellows would have been lost if the old-time barriers had been maintained, may be added the name of the late Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi.  Mary Putnam secured her preliminary medical education in the early ’60’s, and found herself keenly troubled and dissatisfied at the inadequacy of the facilities extended to women for the study of medicine.  She insisted that if women practitioners were to be, as she expressed it, “turned loose” upon the community with license to practise, they should, not only as a matter of justice to themselves but of protection for the women and children whose lives they would have in their hands, be properly qualified.