“A feature of the election was the orderliness and sobriety of the people.  Women were in no way molested.”

At home, a standing argument against woman suffrage has always been that women could not go to the polls without being insulted.  The arguments against woman suffrage have always taken the easy form of prophecy.  The prophets have been prophesying ever since the woman’s rights movement began in 1848—­and in forty-seven years they have never scored a hit.

Men ought to begin to feel a sort of respect for their mothers and wives and sisters by this time.  The women deserve a change of attitude like that, for they have wrought well.  In forty-seven years they have swept an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of America.  In that brief time these serfs have set themselves free essentially.  Men could not have done so much for themselves in that time without bloodshed—­at least they never have; and that is argument that they didn’t know how.  The women have accomplished a peaceful revolution, and a very beneficent one; and yet that has not convinced the average man that they are intelligent, and have courage and energy and perseverance and fortitude.  It takes much to convince the average man of anything; and perhaps nothing can ever make him realize that he is the average woman’s inferior—­yet in several important details the evidences seems to show that that is what he is.  Man has ruled the human race from the beginning—­but he should remember that up to the middle of the present century it was a dull world, and ignorant and stupid; but it is not such a dull world now, and is growing less and less dull all the time.  This is woman’s opportunity—­she has had none before.  I wonder where man will be in another forty-seven years?

In the New Zealand law occurs this:  “The word person wherever it occurs throughout the Act includes woman.”

That is promotion, you see.  By that enlargement of the word, the matron with the garnered wisdom and experience of fifty years becomes at one jump the political equal of her callow kid of twenty-one.  The white population of the colony is 626,000, the Maori population is 42,000.  The whites elect seventy members of the House of Representatives, the Maoris four.  The Maori women vote for their four members.

November 16.  After four pleasant days in Christchurch, we are to leave at midnight to-night.  Mr. Kinsey gave me an ornithorhynchus, and I am taming it.

Sunday, 17th.  Sailed last night in the Flora, from Lyttelton.

So we did.  I remember it yet.  The people who sailed in the Flora that night may forget some other things if they live a good while, but they will not live long, enough to forget that.  The Flora is about the equivalent of a cattle-scow; but when the Union Company find it inconvenient to keep a contract and lucrative to break it, they smuggle her into passenger service, and “keep the change.”