ople who advocate
such unethical principles are degenerate individuals, psychical
atavists, yet they faithfully foreshadow in their own persons that which
would be common to all men and women at some time in the future, if
equal rights were allowed, and carried out in their entirety.

This is an era of luxury, and it is a universally acknowledged fact that
luxury is one of the prime factors in the production of degeneration.
We see forms and phases of degeneration thickly scattered throughout all
circles of society, in the plays which we see performed in our theaters,
and in the books and papers published daily throughout the land. The
greater portion of the _clientele_ of the alienist and neurologist is
made up of women who are suffering with neurotic troubles, generally of
a psychopathic nature. The number of viragints, gynandrists, androgynes,
and other psycho-sexual aberrants of the feminine gender is very large
indeed.

It is folly to deny the fact that the right of female suffrage will make
no change in the environment of woman. The New Woman glories in the
fact, that the era which she hopes to inaugurate will introduce her into
a new world. Not satisfied with the liberty she now enjoys, and which is
proving to be exceedingly harmful to her in more ways than one, she
longs for more freedom, a broader field of action. If nature provided
men and women with an inexhaustible supply of nervous energy, they might
set aside physical laws, and burn the candle at both ends without any
fear of its being burned up. Nature furnishes each individual with just
so much nervous force and no more; moreover, she holds every one
strictly accountable for every portion of nervous energy which he or she
may squander; therefore, it behooves us to build our causeway with
exceeding care, otherwise we will leave a chasm which will engulf
posterity.

The baneful effects resulting from female suffrage will not be seen
to-morrow, or next week, or week after next, or next month, or next
year, or a hundred years hence, perhaps. It is not a question of our day
and generation; it is a matter involving posterity. The simple right to
vote carries with it no immediate danger, the danger comes afterward;
probably many years after the establishment of female suffrage, when
woman, owing to her increased degeneration, gives free rein to her
atavistic tendencies, and hurries ever backward toward the savage state
of her barbarian ancestors. I see, in t