the world how free we were that we failed to safeguard that freedom of which we boasted.

    “We commiserate the Englishman because he chooses to live under an hereditary president called a king, while we are amply content to go on living under an elected king called a president. We cannot understand why he, a free citizen of the free-est country on earth, insists on calling himself a subject; but we are reconciled to the fiction of proclaiming ourselves citizens, while each day, more and more, we are becoming subjects—the subjects of sumptuary legislation, the subjects of statutes framed by bigoted or frightened lawgivers, the subjects of arbitrary mandates and of arbitrary decrees, the subjects, the abject, cringing subjects, of the servant classes,

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    the police classes, the labor classes, the capitalistic classes.”

    Naturally, as a Democrat I have felt these things with enhanced bitterness when the Republicans were in office; nevertheless, I have felt them at other times, too. And, continuing along this line of thought, I have repeatedly said to myself:

    “In view of these conditions, let us give ’em the vote—eventually, but not just yet. While still we have control of the machinery of the ballot let us put them on probation, as it were. They claim to be rational creatures; very well, then, make ’em prove it. Let us give ’em the vote just as soon as they have learned the right way in which to get off of a street car.”

    In this, though, I have changed my mind. I realize now that the demand was impossible, that it was—oh, well, you know what women are!

    We have given woman social superiority; rather she has acquired it through having earned it. Shortly she will have been put on a basis of political equality with men in all the states of the Union. Now she thinks she wants economic equality. But she doesn’t; she only thinks she does. If she should get it she would refuse to abide by its natural limitations on the one side

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