“The ladies actively working to secure the cooperation of their sex in caucuses and citizens’ conventions are not actuated by love of notoriety, and are not, therefore, to be classed with the absolute woman suffragists.”—­Boston Daily Transcript, Sept. 1, 1879.

AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET

When the eloquent colored abolitionist, Charles Remond, once said upon the platform that George Washington, having been a slaveholder, was a villain, Wendell Phillips remonstrated by saying, “Charles, the epithet is not felicitous.”  Reformers are apt to be pelted with epithets quite as ill-chosen.  How often has the charge figured in history, that they were “actuated by love of notoriety”!  The early Christians, it was generally believed, took a positive pleasure in being thrown to the lions, under the influence of this motive; and at a later period there was a firm conviction that the Huguenots consented readily to being broken on the wheel, or sawed in pieces between two boards, and felt amply rewarded by the pleasure of being talked about.  During the whole anti-slavery movement, while the abolitionists were mobbed, fined, and imprisoned,—­while they were tabooed by good society, depleted of their money, kept out of employment, by the mere fact of their abolitionism,—­there never was a moment when their motive was not considered by many persons to be the love of notoriety.  Why should the advocates of woman suffrage expect any different treatment now?

It is not necessary, in order to dispose of this charge, to claim that all reformers are heroes or saints.  Even in the infancy of any reform, it takes along with it some poor material; and unpleasant traits are often developed by the incidents of the contest.  Doubtless many reformers attain to a certain enjoyment of a fight, at last:  it is one of the dangerous tendencies which those committed to this vocation must resist.  But, so far as my observation goes, those who engage in reform for the sake of notoriety generally hurt the reform so much that they render it their chief service when they leave it; and this happy desertion usually comes pretty early in their career.  The besetting sin of reformers is not, so far as I can judge, the love of notoriety, but the fate of power and of flattery within their own small circle,—­a temptation quite different from the other, both in its origin and its results.

Notoriety comes so soon to a reformer that its charms, whatever they may be, soon pall upon the palate, just as they do in case of a popular poet or orator, who is so used to seeing himself in print that he hardly notices it.  I suppose there is no young person so modest that he does not, on first seeing his name in a newspaper, cut out the passage with a certain tender solicitude, and perhaps purchase a few extra copies of the fortunate journal.  But when the same person has been battered by a score or two of