leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the
Structural Iron Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in
the town Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes
such a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never mounted a
horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less useful than
a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural Iron Workers
would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and knock down the busts
of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms--this citizen is commonly denounced as an
anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus;
it has come to be immoral. And many other planes, high and low. For an
American to question any of the articles of fundamental faith cherished
by the majority is for him to run grave risks of social disaster. The
old English offence of "imagining the King's death" has been formally
revived by the American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in
jail for committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in
some parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts
as believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and
speaking the language of countries recently at war with the Republic,
and conveying to a private friend a formula for making synthetic gin.
All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats against
democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are. For democracy is
grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be
protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue
it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play
of ideas. In the United States this is not only its first concern, but
also its last concern. No other enterprise, not even the trade in public
offices and contracts, occupies the rulers of the land so steadily, or
makes heavier demands upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion.

Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to
change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely literary
criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in order
to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon the
woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening it
with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So deciding,
I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of