k. Practice and education will, here as in all other cases,
give further aid. If I go not in the water, I shall never learn to swim;
if I study no foreign language and do not practice it, I shall never
learn to speak it. Everyone finds that natural; and yet many fail to
realize that the same holds good in the affairs of government and
society. Are our women unfitter than the far lower negroes, to whom full
political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly
intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least
cultured man,--an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or
an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let
these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his
mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, the very
qualities that alone make him what he is. Truly wonderful!

Moreover, we in Germany would no longer be running the risk of being the
first to take the leap in the dark and the unknown. The United States,
England and other countries have opened the way. In the State of Wyoming
in the United States, woman suffrage has been tested since 1869. On
November 12, 1872, writing from Laramie City, Wyo., on the subject,
Judge Kingman says in the Chicago "Women's Journal":

"Three years ago to-day women obtained the right of electing and of
being elected to office in our Territory, in the same manner as the
other electors. During this period they have voted and have been voted
for; they have exercised the functions of jurors and arbiters; they have
taken part in large numbers at our elections, and although I believe
that some among us oppose the admission of women from motives of
principle, no one, I think, can refuse to recognize that their influence
on the elections has been an elevating one. It caused them to be
conducted in a more peaceable and orderly manner, and at the same time
enabled our courts of justice to discover and punish various kinds of
crime that had until then remained unpunished.

"For instance, when the Territory was first organized, there was
scarcely a man who did not carry a revolver and make use of it in the
slightest dispute. I cannot remember a single case in which a jury
composed of men brought in a verdict of guilty against one of those who
had shot with a revolver, but when two or three women were among them,
they have invariably attended to the instructions of the Court."

In what e