in less danger from its poor men, who have got to stay in it and bring up their children, than from its rich men, who have always Paris and London to fall back upon.  I do not see that even a poll-tax or registry-tax is of any use as a safeguard; for if men are to be bought the tax merely offers a more indirect and palatable form in which to pay the price.  Many a man consents to have his poll-tax paid by his party or his candidate, when he would reject the direct offer of a dollar bill.

But this is all private speculation, and has nothing to do with the woman-suffrage movement.  All that we can ask, as advocates of this reform, is that the inclusion or the exclusion should be the same for both sexes.  We cannot put off the equality of woman till that time, a few centuries hence, when the Social Science Association shall have succeeded in agreeing on the true basis of “scientific legislation.”  It is as if we urged that wives should share their husbands’ dinners, and were told that the physicians had not decided whether beefsteak were wholesome.  The answer is, “Beefsteak or tripe, yeast or saleratus, which you please.  But, meanwhile, what is good enough for the wife is good enough for the husband.”

FOR SELF-PROTECTION

I remember to have read, many years ago, the life of Sir Samuel Romilly, the English philanthropist.  He was the author of more beneficent legal reforms than any man of his day, and there was in that very book a long list of the changes he still meant to bring about.  It struck me very much, that among these proposed reforms not one of any importance referred to the laws about women.

It shows—­what all experience has shown—­that no class or race or sex can safely trust its protection in any hands but its own.  The laws of England in regard to woman were then so bad that Lord Brougham afterwards said they needed total reconstruction, if they were to be touched at all.  Yet it is only since woman suffrage began to be talked about, that the work of law-reform has really taken firm hold.  In many cases in America the beneficent measures are directly to be traced to some appeal from feminine advocates.  Even in Canada, as was once stated by Dr. Cameron of Toronto, the bill protecting the property of married women was passed under the immediate pressure of Lucy Stone’s eloquence.  And even where this direct agency could not be traced, the general fact that the atmosphere was full of the agitation had much to do with all the reforms that took place.  Legislatures, unwilling to give woman the ballot, were shamed into giving her something.  The chairman of the judiciary committee in Rhode Island told me that until he heard women argue before the committee he had not reflected upon their legal disabilities, or thought how unjust these were.  While the matter was left to the other sex only, even men like Sir Samuel Romilly forgot the wrongs of woman.  When she began to advocate her own cause men also waked up.