es is religion, which should train men and women
to a far higher standard than "society" alone can teach. This standard
should be embodied, theoretically, in the Christian Church; but unhappily
"society" is too often stronger than this embodiment, and turns the church
itself into a mere temple of fashion. Other opposing forces are known as
science and common-sense, which is only science written in shorthand. On
some of these various forces all reforms are based, the woman-suffrage
reform among them. If it could really be shown that some limited social
circle was opposed to this, then the moral would seem to be, "So much the
worse for the social circle." It used to be thought in anti-slavery days
that one of the most blessed results of that agitation was the education it
gave to young men and women who would otherwise have merely grown up "in
society," but were happily taken in hand by a stronger influence. It is
Goethe who suggests, when discussing Hamlet in "Wilhelm Meister," that, if
an oak be planted in a flower-pot, it will be worse in the end for the
flower-pot than for the tree. And to those who watch, year after year, the
young human seedlings planted "in society," the main point of interest lies
in the discovery which of these are likely to grow into oaks.

But the truth is that the very use of the word "society" in this sense is
narrow and misleading. We Americans are fortunate enough to live in a
larger society, where no conventional position or family traditions exert
an influence that is to be in the least degree compared with the influence
secured by education, energy, and character. No matter how fastidious the
social circle, one is constantly struck with the limitations of its
influence, and with the little power exerted by its members as compared
with that which may easily be wielded by tongue and pen. No merely
fashionable woman in New York, for instance, has a position sufficiently
important to be called influential compared with that of a woman who can
speak in public so as to command hearers, or can write so as to secure
readers. To be at the head of a normal school, or to be a professor in a
college where co-education prevails, is to have a sway over the destinies
of America which reduces all mere "social position" to a matter of cards
and compliments and page's buttons.

THE BATTLE OF THE CARDS

The great winter's contest of the visiting-cards recommences at the end of
every autumn. Suspen