ne and all, they are opposed to the
turmoil and corruption that it involves, and resentful of the invasion
of liberty underlying it. Being realists, they have no belief in
any program which proposes to cure the natural swinishness of men by
legislation. Every normal woman believes, and quite accurately, that the
average man is very much like her husband, John, and she knows very well
that John is a weak, silly and knavish fellow, and that any effort to
convert him into an archangel overnight is bound to come to grief. As
for her view of the average creature of her own sex, it is marked by a
cynicism so penetrating and so destructive that a clear statement of it
would shock beyond endurance.

32. The Woman Voter

Thus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised women of
Protestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot,
will give, any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead
and instruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that these
suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They
are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves
to advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly
preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh
at them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of
the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great
political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes
an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing
but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole
intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in
public office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister
who joins the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of the
ladies to take to this political immolation seem to me to be frightfully
plain. I know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia only by their
portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the United States
I have studied at close range at various large political gatherings,
including the two national conventions first following the extension
of the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow--in fact, I prefer a
certain melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon brilliance
of youth--but I give you my word that there were not five women at
either national convention who could have embraced me in camera without
first givin