But Jack Sheppard, if he condescended to answer us at all, would coolly say, “Wait a while, till I have finished my present job.  Being in prison, my first business is to get out of prison.  Wait till I have picked this lock, and mined this wall; wait till I have made a saw out of a watch-spring, and a ladder out of a pair of blankets.  Let me do my first task, and get out of limbo, and then see if your little printing-presses and locomotives are too puzzling for my fingers.”

Politically speaking, woman is in jail, and her first act of skill must be in getting through the wall.  For her there is no tariff question, no problem of the fisheries.  She will come to that by and by, if you please; but for the present her statesmanship must be employed nearer home.  The “civil-service reform” in which she is most concerned is a reform which shall bring her in contact with the civil service.  Her political creed, for the present, is limited to that of Sterne’s starling in the cage,—­“I can’t get out.”  If she is supposed to have any common-sense at all, she will best show it by beginning at the point where she is, instead of at the point where somebody else is.  She would indeed be as foolish as these editors think her if she now spent her brains upon the tariff question, which she cannot reach, instead of upon her own enfranchisement, which she is gradually reaching.

The woman-suffrage movement in America, in all its stages and subdivisions, has been the work of woman.  No doubt men have helped in it:  much of the talking has been done by them, and they have furnished many of the printed documents.  But the energy, the methods, the unwearied purpose, of the movement, have come from women:  they have led in all councils; they have established the newspapers, got up the conventions, addressed the legislatures, and raised the money.  Thirty years have shown, with whatever temporary variations, one vast wave of progress toward success, both in this country and in Europe.  Now success is statesmanship.

I remember well the shouts of laughter that used to greet the anti-slavery orators when they claimed that the real statesmen of the country were not the Clays and Calhouns, who spent their strength in trying to sustain slavery, and failed, but the Garrisons, who devoted their lives to its overthrow, and were succeeding.  Yet who now doubts this?  Tried by the same standard, the statesmanship of to-day does not lie in the men who can find no larger questions before them than those which concern the fisheries, but in the women whose far-reaching efforts will one day make every existing voting-list so much waste paper.