like their husbands, because their husbands sometimes vote right; but ex-Chief-Justice Fisher of Wyoming says:  ’When the Republicans nominate a bad man and the Democrats a good one, the Republican women do not hesitate a moment to “scratch” the bad and substitute the good.  It is just so with the Democrats; hence we almost always have a mixture of office-holders.  I have seen the effects of female suffrage, and, instead of being a means of encouragement to fraud and corruption, it tends greatly to purify elections and to promote better government.’  Now, ‘scratching’ is the most difficult feature of the art of voting, and if women have mastered this, they are doing very well.  Furthermore, the English suffragettes have completely outgeneralled the professional politicians.  They discovered that no cause can get recognition in politics unless it is brought to the attention, and that John Bull in particular will not begin to pay attention ‘until, you stand on your head to talk to him.’  They regretted to do this, but in doing it they secured the attention and interest of all England.  They then followed a relentless policy of opposing the election of any candidate of the party in power.  The Liberal men had been playing with the Liberal women, promising support and then laughing the matter off.  But they are now reduced to an appeal to the maternal instinct of the women.  They say it is unloving of them to oppose their own kind.  Politics is a poor game, but this is politics.”

V. The last objection I would call the moral.  It embraces such arguments as, that woman is too impulsive, too easily swayed by her emotions to hold responsible positions, that the world is very evil and slippery, and that she must therefore constantly have man to protect her—­a pious duty, which he avows solemnly it has ever been his special delight to perform.  The preceding pages are a commentary on the manner in which man has discharged this duty.  In Delaware, for instance, the age of legal consent was until 1889 seven years.  The institution of Chivalry, to take another example, is usually praised for the high estimation and protection it secured for women; yet any one who has read its literature knows that, in practice, it did nothing of the sort.  The noble lord who was so gallant to his lady love—­who, by the way, was frequently the wife of another man—­had very little scruple about seducing a maid of low degree.  The same gallantry is conspicuous in the Letters of Lord Chesterfield, beneath whose unctuous courtesy the beast of sensuality is always leering.

In the past the main function of woman outside of the rearing of children has been to satisfy the carnal appetite of man, to prepare his food, to minister to his physical comfort; she was barred from participation in the intellectual.  In order to hold her to these bonds a Divine Sanction was sought.  The Mohammedan found it in the Koran; the Christian, in the Bible—­just as slavery was justified repeatedly from the story of Ham, just as the Stuarts and the Bourbons believed firmly that they were the special favourites of God.