When Margaret Fuller first came forward into literature, she supposed that literature was all she wanted.  It was not till she came to write upon woman’s position that she discovered what woman needed.  Clara Barton, driving her ambulance or her supply wagon at the battle’s edge, did not foresee, perhaps, that she should make that touching appeal, when the battle was over, imploring her own enfranchisement from the soldiers she had befriended.  Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa Alcott, came to the claim for the ballot earlier than a million others, because they were the intellectual leaders of American womanhood.  They saw farthest, because they were in the highest place.  They were the recognized representatives of their sex before they gave in their adhesion to the new demand.  Their judgment is as the judgment of the council of officers, while Flora McFlimsey’s opinion is as the opinion of John Smith, unassigned recruit.  But if the generals make arrangements for a battle, the chance is that John Smith will have to take a hand in it, or else run away.

It is a rare thing for the petition for suffrage from any town to comprise the majority of women in that town.  It makes no difference:  if there are few women in the town who want to vote, there is as much propriety in their voting as if there were ten millions, so long as the majority are equally protected in their right to stay at home.  But when the names of petitioners come to be weighed as well as counted, the character, the purity, the intelligence, the social and domestic value of the petitioners is seldom denied.  The women who wish to vote are not the idle, the ignorant, the narrow-minded, or the vicious; they are not “the dangerous classes:”  they represent the best class in the community, when tried by the highest standard.  They are the natural leaders.  What they now see to be right will also be perceived even by the foolish and the ignorant by and by.

In a poultry-yard in spring, when the first brood of duckling’s goes toddling to the waterside, no doubt all the younger or feebler broods, just hatched out of similar eggs, think these innovators dreadfully mistaken.  “You are out of place,” they feebly pipe.  “See how happy we are in our safe nests.  Perhaps, by and by, when properly introduced into society, we may run about a little on land, but to swim!—­never!” Meanwhile their elder kindred are splashing and diving in ecstasy; and, so surely as they are born ducklings, all the rest will swim in their turn.  The instinct of the first duck solves the problem for all the rest.  It is a mere question of time.  Sooner or later, all the broods in the most conservative yard will follow their leaders.

HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS