The heroines and the prophets were going to be replaced, he believed, by leaders much more practical and less scrupulous, and the movement would follow the leaders.  As far as polities went, he not only looked for no millennium, but for a reaction in the other direction.  There’d be more open graft, he thought.

Rose asked him if he meant that he thought women were less honest than men.

“It isn’t a lack of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter,” he said.  “It’s seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who’ve held out helping hands to you.  Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of years to see things in that private and personal way, and to exalt the private and personal virtues.  Just as they’ve been trained to stick to rule of thumb methods that more or less work, rather than to try experiments.  So, on the whole, I think their getting the vote will mean that politics will be crookeder and more reactionary than they’ve been in a good many years.  All the same I’m for it, because it’s a part of democracy, and I’m for democracy all the way.  Not because you get good government out of it; you don’t.  You get as good as you deserve, and in the long run I think a society that has to deserve as good a government as it gets, grows stronger and healthier than one that gets a better government than it deserves.”

“That old tory radical over there,” said Jane, with a nod at Rodney, “has been grinning away for half an hour without saying a word.  I’d like to know what you think about it.”

“’Tory radical’?” questioned Rose.

“That’s what Barry calls him,” Jane explained.  “He’s so conservative about the law that he calls Blackstone an upstart and a faker, but the things he’d do, when it comes, down to cases—­on good old common law principles, of course, would make the average Progressive’s hair curl.  Why, when people were getting excited over Roosevelt’s recall of judicial decisions—­remember?—­Rodney was for abolishing the Bill of Rights altogether.”

“What’s the Bill of Rights?” asked Rose.

Jane headed Rodney off.  “Oh, life, liberty and property without due process of law,” she said.  “Neither of these men has any opinion of rights.  The only natural inalienable right you’ve got, they say, is to take what you can get and keep it until somebody stronger than you, that you can’t run away from, catches you.  What you call your individual rights are just what society has made and doesn’t for the moment need, to keep itself going.  If it does need them, it takes them back.  Only, of course, it has got to keep itself going.  If it doesn’t, people get up and kick it to bits and start again.”  She turned to Rodney.  “But what do you think about it, really?  What Barry’s been talking about, I mean.  Are you for it?”