years in successive unpopular reforms, I suppose that he not only would leave the paper uncut or unpurchased, but would hardly take the pains even to correct a misstatement, were it asserted that he had inherited a fortune or murdered his grandmother.  The moral is that the love of notoriety is soon amply filled, in a reformer’s experience, and that he will not, as a rule, sacrifice home and comfort, money and friends, without some stronger inducement.  This is certainly true of most of the men who have interested themselves in this particular movement, the “weak-minded men,” as the reporters, with witty antithesis, still describe them; and it must be much the same with the “strong-minded women” who share their base career.

And it is to be remembered, above all, that, considered as an engine for obtaining notoriety, the woman-suffrage agitation is a great waste of energy.  The same net result could have been won with far less expenditure in other ways.  There is not a woman connected with it who could not have achieved far more real publicity as a manager of charity fairs or as a sensation letter-writer.  She could have done this, too, with far less trouble, without the loss of a single genteel friend, without forfeiting a single social attention, without having a single ill-natured thing said about her—­except perhaps that she bored people, a charge to which the highest and lowest forms of prominence are equally open.  Nay, she might have done even more than this, if notoriety was her sole aim:  for she might have become a “variety” minstrel or a female pedestrian; she might have written a scandalous novel; she might have got somebody to aim at her that harmless pistol, which has helped the fame of so many a wandering actress, while its bullet somehow never hits anything but the wall.  All this she might have done, and obtained a notoriety beyond doubt.  Instead of this, she has preferred to prowl about, picking up a precarious publicity by giving lectures to willing lyceums, writing books for eager publishers, organizing schools, setting up hospitals, and achieving for her sex something like equal rights before the law.  Either she has shown herself, as a seeker after notoriety, to be a most foolish or ill-judging person,—­ or else, as was said of Washington’s being a villain, “the epithet is not felicitous.”

THE ROB ROY THEORY

“The Saturday Review,” in an article which denounces all equality in marriage laws and all plans of woman suffrage, admits frankly the practical obstacles in the way of the process of voting.  “Possibly the presence of women as voters would tend still further to promote order than has been done by the ballot.”  It plants itself wholly on one objection, which goes far deeper, thus:—­

“If men choose to say that women are not their equals, women have nothing to do but to give in.  Physical force, the ultimate basis of all society and all government, must be on the side of the men; and those who have the key of the position will not consent permanently to abandon it.”

It is a great pleasure when an opponent of justice is willing to fall back thus frankly upon the Rob Roy theory:—­