back. Honestly, Miss Allstairs,
you'll get me so afraid of the cars in a minute that I'll have to ditch
this train of thought and talk about art. Ever hear me talk about art?
Well, it would serve you right if you did. I talked about art with a
kalsominer once, and he wanted to fight me for the honor of his
profession.

However, as I was saying, the women voted at Siwash that fall and I
guess they must have liked the taste, for the first thing we knew we had
the woman vote to take care of all the time. The next fall pretty nearly
every girl in the college turned out to class meetings, and the way
they voted pretty nearly drove us mad. They seemed to regard it as a
game. They fussed about whether to vote on pink paper or blue paper;
voted for members of the Faculty for class president; one of them voted
for the President of the United States for president of the Sophomore
class; wanted to vote twice; came up to the ballot box and demanded
their votes back because they had changed their minds; went away before
election and left word with a friend to vote for them. Took us an hour,
right in football practice time, to get the ticket through in our class;
and what with lending pencils and chasing girls who carried their
ballots away with them, and getting called down for trying to see that
everything went along proper and shipshape and according to program, we
boys were half crazy when it was all over.

But the girls liked it enormously. It was a novelty for them, and we saw
right there that it was a case of organize the female vote or have
things hopelessly muddled up before the end of the year. In the
interests of harmony things had to be done in a businesslike manner.
Certain candidates had to be put through and certain factions had to be
gently but firmly stepped on. Harmony, you know, Miss Allstairs, is a
most important thing in politics. Without harmony you can't do a thing.
Harmony in politics consists of giving the insurgents not what they ask
for, but something that you don't want. I was a grand little harmonizer
in my day too. I ran the oratorical league the year before it went
broke and then traded the presidency to the Chi Yi-Delta Whoop crowd for
the editorship of the Student Weekly. That's harmony. They were happy
and so was I. When I saw how hard they had to hustle to pay the
association debts the next fall I was so happy I could hardly stand it.

No, Miss Allstairs, that was not meanness on my part. It was p