ith criminals and lunatics,
had touched my higher self more profoundly than anything had had
power to do for years.

Though taking a vivid interest in the electioneering, owing to the
large distillation of the essence of human nature it afforded, as
neither of the candidates had a practical grip of public business, I
cared not which should poll highest; but now I resolved to procure my
right and go to the ballot, and, if nothing more, make an informal
vote _for the sake of all that it stood for_.

At back of the simple paper were arrayed the spirits of countless
noble and fearless men and women who had so loved justice and their
fellows that they had spent their lives in working for this betterment
of the conditions of living, and the little paper further stood for an
improvement in the position of women, and consequently of all
humanity, inconceivable to cursory observation.

As for a woman going to the poll and voting for Jones or Smith, that
was harmless in either case, and would not help her live or die or pay
her debts, as Uncle Jake expressed it; but excepting the female vote
for the House of Keys in the Isle of Man, the enfranchisement of
women, spreading from one to the other of the Australian States,
represented the first time that woman, even in our vauntedly great and
highly civilised British Empire, was constitutionally, statutably
recognised as a human being,--equal with her brothers. That women
shall compete equally with men in the utilitarian industrialism of
every walk of life is not the ultimate ideal of universal adult
franchise. Such emancipation is sought as the most condensed and
direct method of abolishing the female sex disability which in time
shall bring the human intelligence, regardless of sex, to an
understanding of the superiority of the mother sex as it concerns the
race--as it is the race, the whole race, and consequently worthy of a
status in life where it shall neither have to battle at the polls for
its rights nor be sold in the market-place for bread.

The empty-headed cannot be expected to perceive the magnitude of this
upward step in the evolution of man, and its machinery may not run
smoothly for a span; we nor our children's children may not know much
benefit from what it symbolises, but shall we who are comfortable in
rights wrested from ignorance and prejudice but never enjoyed by past
generations, be too selfish and small to rejoice in the possibility of
bettered conditions