ar her make a speech on woman
suffrage--I mean when it is really to her the cause of causes; there are
those who take it up for other reasons, as the club-women do their papers,
with not dissimilar results. In all these cases clearness of presentation,
weight of invective, keenness of analysis spring from interest. None of
these women, if she has a feminine mind, treats these things as a man
would. We men are very apt to complain of the woman's mental processes,
for the same reason that narrow "patriots" always suspect and deride the
methods of a foreigner, simply because they are strange and we do not
understand them. But what we are compelled to think of the results is
shown by the fact that when we are truly wise we are apt to seek the
advice and counsel of the other sex and to act upon it, even when we
cannot fathom the processes by which it was reached.

All the more reason this why the woman should be left to herself and not
forced to model her club paper on the mental processes of a man, used with
many necessary elisions and sometimes with very bad workmanship, in the
construction of the cyclopaedia article never intended to be employed for
any such purpose.

Perhaps we can never make the ordinary clubwoman talk like Susan B.
Anthony, or Anna Shaw, or Beatrice Hale, or Fola La Follette; any more
than we can put into the mouth of the ordinary business man the words of
Lincoln, or John B. Gough, or Phillips Brooks, or Raymond Robins--but get
somehow into the weakest of either sex the impulses, the interests, the
energies that once stood or now stand behind the utterances of any one of
these great Americans, and see if the result is not something worth while!
An appreciative critic of the first paper in this series, writing in _The
Yale Alumni Weekly_, gives it as his opinion that these readers are in the
first stage of their education--that of "initial intellectual interest."
He says: "Curiosity, then suspicion, come later to grow into individual
intellectual judgment."

I wish I could agree that what we have diagnosed as a malady is only an
early stage of something that is ultimately to develop into matured
judgment. But the facts seem clearly to show that, far from possessing
"initial intellectual interest," these readers are practically devoid of
any kind of interest whatever, properly speaking. Such as they have is not
proper to the subject, but simply due to the fact that they desire to
retain their club mem