could do it as well as a woman; and a chimpanzee after a few lessons
could do it as well as a child. But nobody ought to regard it merely
as making a cross on paper; everyone ought to regard it as what it
ultimately is, branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow,
signing the death warrant. Both men and women ought to face more fully
the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing
them.

On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private
executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly
unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in
broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting
heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the
manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions
there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory
and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in
actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as
well as rotten eggs; of crying "Hosannah" as well as "Crucify." But I
do not like the public executioner being turned into the private
executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of
business, and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum
and the market place. In modern times the official has lost all the
social honor and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of
the bowstring.

Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order
to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else
from which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the
fact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make
the situation different, unless we openly say that we are giving the
suffrage, not only because it is power but because it is not, or in
other words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. No
suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few suffragists
will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalties is
an ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad may
have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in
these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as
well as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I
noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In the
sa