social, and hence, needing men less, either to make them
homes, or to gratify indirectly their ambitions, their
affections will become atrophied, the springs of domestic
life will disappear in the arid sands of an unfeminine
publicity, and marriage, with all the wearying cares and
burdens and anxieties that it inevitably brings to every
earnest woman, will be regarded more and more as a state to
be shunned. The few who enter it will be compassionated much
as a minister is who undertakes a dangerous foreign mission.
Men will stand mateless, and the ruins of the hymeneal
altars everywhere crumble mournfully away, and be known to
tradition only by their vanishing inscriptions: "To the
unknown god." But it is ill jesting over that which tugs at
every woman's heartstrings and which impinges upon the very
life-centres of society. If women, on being made really free
to choose, will not marry, then we must arraign men on the
charge of having made the married state so irksome and
distasteful to women that they prefer celibacy when they
dare enjoy it. Observe, however, the inconsistency of
another line of reasoning running parallel with this in the
floating literature of the day: "Motherhood," these writers
say, "is the natural vocation of women; is, indeed, an
instinct so mighty, even if unconscious, that it draws women
toward matrimony with a yearning as irresistible as that
which pulls the great sea upon the land in blind response to
the moon." If this be true, society is safe, and women will
still be wives, no matter how much they may exult in
political freedom, no matter how alluringly individual
careers may open before them, nor how accessible the
tempting prizes of human ambition may become.

Well, the day came,--the _dies irae_ for one side or the other,
and it proved to be for the "one." The measure was defeated. Ten
thousand votes were for it, twenty thousand against it. Women
remained at the polls all day, distributing ballots, and
answering objections. They had flowers on all the little tables
where the tickets were heaped, on which were printed the three
words, "Woman Suffrage Approved," words for