It was a pleasant surprise to meet the large number of Americans usually at the receptions of Mrs. Peter Taylor.  Graceful and beautiful, in full dress, standing beside her husband, who evidently idolized her, Mrs. Taylor appeared quite as refined in her drawing room as if she had never been exposed to the public gaze while presiding over a suffrage convention.  Mrs. Taylor is called the mother of the suffrage movement.  The reform has not been carried on in all respects to her taste, nor on what she considers the basis of high principle.  Neither she nor Mrs. Jacob Bright has ever been satisfied with the bill asking the rights of suffrage for “widows and spinsters” only.  To have asked this right “for all women duly qualified,” as but few married women are qualified through possessing property in their own right, would have been substantially the same, without making any invidious distinctions.  Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Bright felt that, as married women were the greatest sufferers under the law, they should be the first rather than the last to be enfranchised.  The others, led by Miss Becker, claimed that it was good policy to make the demand for “spinsters and widows,” and thus exclude the “family unit” and “man’s headship” from the discussion; and yet these were the very points on which the objections were invariably based.  They claimed that, if “spinsters and widows” were enfranchised, they would be an added power to secure to married women their rights.  But the history of the past gives us no such assurance.  It is not certain that women would be more just than men, and a small privileged class of aristocrats have long governed their fellow-countrymen.  The fact that the spinsters in the movement advocated such a bill, shows that they were not to be trusted in extending it.  John Stuart Mill, too, was always opposed to the exclusion of married women in the demand for suffrage.

My sense of justice was severely tried by all I heard of the persecutions of Mrs. Besant and Mr. Bradlaugh for their publications on the right and duty of parents to limit population.  Who can contemplate the sad condition of multitudes of young children in the Old World whose fate is to be brought up in ignorance and vice—­a swarming, seething mass which nobody owns—­without seeing the need of free discussion of the philosophical principles that underlie these tangled social problems?  The trials of Foote and Ramsey, too, for blasphemy, seemed unworthy a great nation in the nineteenth century.  Think of well-educated men of good moral standing thrown into prison in solitary confinement, for speaking lightly of the Hebrew idea of Jehovah and the New Testament account of the birth of Jesus!  Our Protestant clergy never hesitate to make the dogmas and superstitions of the Catholic Church seem as absurd as possible, and why should not those who imagine they have outgrown Protestant superstitions make them equally ridiculous?  Whatever is true can stand investigation and ridicule.