he small minority that is intelligent, agnostic and self-possessed--say
six women to one man. Thus, out of their greater instinct for reality,
they will make democracy safe for a democracy.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his
stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever
embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all hat have gone
before. But where is the delusion that women cherish--I mean habitually,
firmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of propositions, held and
maintained by them in sober earnest, that are obviously not true? (I
allude here, of course, to genuine women, not to suffragettes and other
such pseudo-males). As for me, I should not like to undertake such a
list. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it. Women,
as a class, believe in none of the ludicrous rights, duties and
pious obligations that men are forever gabbling about. Their superior
intelligence is in no way more eloquently demonstrated than by their
ironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude toward
men is one of aloof disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what men
believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is substantially
the same, It takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some new
fallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and even then they halt,
hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Colorado
had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to prohibition
sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt it; their own
majority voice was against it to the end. During the interval the men
voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking to the
mourners' bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the women rejected
the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition was adopted during the
war without their votes--they did not get the franchise throughout
the country until it was in the Constitution--and it is without their
support today. The American man, despite his reputation for lawlessness,
is actually very much afraid of the police, and in all the regions
where prohibition is now actually enforced he makes excuses for his
poltroonish acceptance of it by arguing that it will do him good in
the long run, or that he ought to sacrifice his private desires to the
common weal. But it is almost impossible to find an American woman of
any culture who is in favour of it. O