observe greater caution on the social
field. Thus the clergy will forfeit its influence with the workingmen,
especially at such critical junctures when considerations for the
Government and the ruling classes drive it to approve of, or tolerate
actions and laws directed against the interests of the working class.
The same causes will, in the end, have their influence upon woman. When
at public meetings, through newspapers and from personal observation she
will have learned where her own interest lies, woman will emancipate
herself from the clergy, the same as man has done. The fiercest opponent
of female suffrage is the clergy, and it knows the reason why. Its rule
and its domains are endangered.

That the movement for the political rights of woman has not been
promptly crowned with greater success is no reason to withhold the
ballot from her. What would the workingmen say if the Liberals proposed
abolishing manhood suffrage--and the same is very inconvenient to
them--on the ground that it benefits the Socialists in particular? A
good law does not become bad by reason of him who wields it not yet
having learned its right use.

Naturally, the right to be elected should go together with the right to
elect. "A woman in the tribune of the Reichstag, that would be a
spectacle!" we hear people exclaim. Our generation has grown accustomed
to the sight of women in the speaker's tribune at their conventions and
meetings; in the United States, also in the pulpit and the jury box--why
not, then, also in the tribune of the Reichstag? The first woman elected
to the Reichstag, would surely know how to impose respect. When the
first workingmen entered the Reichstag it was also believed they could
be laughed down, and it was claimed that the working class would soon
realize the foolishness it had committed in electing such people. Its
representatives, however, knew how to make themselves quickly respected;
the fear to-day is lest there be too many of them. Frivolous witlings
put in: "Just imagine a pregnant woman in the tribune of the Reichstag;
how utterly unesthetic!" The identical gentlemen find it, however, quite
in order that pregnant women work at the most unesthetic trades, at
trades in which female dignity, health and decency are undermined. In
the eyes of a Socialist, that man is a wretch who can crack jokes over a
woman with child. The mere thought that his own mother once looked like
that before she brought him into the wor