We have fortunately a means of testing, with some fairness of estimate, the probable amount of this peril.  It is generally admitted—­and certainly no German-American will deny—­that the most fruitful sources of hostility and war in all times have been religious, not political.  All merely political antagonism, certainly all which is possible in a republic, fades into insignificance before this more powerful dividing influence.  Yet we leave all this great explosive force in unimpeded operation,—­at any moment it may be set in action, in any one of those “pretty family scenes” which “Puck” depicts,—­while we are solemnly warned against admitting the comparatively mild peril of a political difference!  It is like cautioning a manufacturer of dynamite against the danger of meddling with mere edge-tools.  Even with all the intensity of feeling on religious matters, few families are seriously divided by them; and the influence of political differences would be still more insignificant.

The simple fact is that there is no better basis for union than mutual respect for each other’s opinions; and this can never be obtained without an intelligent independence, “I would rather have a thorn in my side than an echo,” said Emerson of friendship; and the same is true of married life.  It is the echoes, the nonentities, of whom men grow tired; it is the women with some flavor of individuality who keep the hearts of their husbands.  This is only applying in a higher sense what Shakespeare’s Cleopatra saw.  When her handmaidens are questioning how to hold a lover, and one says,—­

    “Give way to him in all:  cross him in nothing,”—­

Cleopatra, from the depth of an unequalled experience, retorts,—­

    “Thou speakest like a fool:  the way to lose him!”

And what “the serpent of old Nile” said, the wives of the future, who are to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, may well ponder.  It takes two things different to make a union; and part of that difference may as well lie in matters political as anywhere else.

WOMEN AS ECONOMISTS

An able lawyer of Boston, arguing the other day before a legislative committee in favor of giving to the city council a check upon the expenditures of the school committee, gave as one reason that this body would probably include more women henceforward, and that women were ordinarily more lavish than men in their use of money.  The truth of this assumption was questioned at the time; and, the more I think of it, the more contrary it is to my whole experience.  I should say that women, from the very habit of their lives, are led to be more particular about details, and more careful as to small economies.  The very fact that they handle less money tends to this.  When they are told to spend money, as they often are by loving or ambitious husbands, they no doubt do it freely:  they have naturally more taste than men,