hey give heed to the
old, old excuse, "The woman tempted me, and I did register"?

It surely is strange that such severe penalties should be visited on a
woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a
man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote.
If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of
citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may
sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the
metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he may even travel hilariously
from city to city, with free passes and free drinks--who treats Miss
Anthony?--making festive calls, and dropping ballots for cards, and
no disturbance comes of it--he is neither fined nor confined. So, it
would seem, "a little voting is a dangerous thing."

Say what you will, the whole question of woman's status in the State
and the Church, in society and the family, is full of absurd
contradictions and monstrous anomalies. We are so responsible, yet
irresponsible--we are idols, we are idiots--we are everything, we are
nothing. We are the Caryatides, rearing up the entablature of the
temple of liberty we are never allowed to enter. We may plot against a
government, and hang for it; but if we help to found and sustain a
government by patriotic effort and devotion, by toil and hardship, by
courage, loyalty, and faith, by the sacrifice of those nearest and
dearest to us, and then venture to clutch at the crumbs that fall from
the table where our Masters Jonathan, Patrick, Hans, and Sambo sit at
feast, you arrest us, imprison us, try us, fine us, and then add
injury to insult, by calling us old, ugly, and fanatical.

One is forcibly reminded of the sermon of the colored brother on
woman, the heads of which discourse were: "Firstly. What am woman?
Secondly. Whar did she come from? Thirdly. Who does she belong to?
Fourthly. Which way am she gwine to?"

The law and the Gospel have settled the "secondly" and "thirdly."
Woman came from man, and belongs to him by the mortgage he holds on
her through that spare-rib; but "firstly" and "fourthly" remain as
profound and unsolvable questions as they were before the Ethiopian
divine wrestled with them. But perhaps this troublous and perplexed
existence is our "be-all and end-all"; that in the life beyond, man
may foreclose that old mortgage and re-absorb woman into his glorified
and all-sufficient being.

I have never believed w