e fashion columns! She hardly
finds time to answer her husband's petulant inquiry as to what she has
done with the comic supplement. Can woman take an impersonal view of
things? No, says Professor Van Doodle. In a critical Presidential
election, one in which the fate of the country is at stake, she will
vote for the candidate from whom she thinks she can get most for her
husband and her children, whereas, her husband under the same
circumstances will cast aside all personal interests and vote the same
ticket his father voted for. Woman, concluded the professor, is
constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong,
between truth and falsehood.

"Mrs. Excelsior made a spirited defence. She showed that woman's
undeveloped sense of what truth and honesty are, would not handicap her
in the pursuit of practical politics. She argued that the complicated
problems of municipal finance are no easier for the man who sets out to
raise a family on fifteen dollars a week than for the woman who succeeds
in doing so. She declared that a person who can travel thirty miles by
subway and surface car, price $500 worth of dressgoods, and buy her
lunch, all on fifteen cents in cash and a transfer ticket, would make a
good comptroller for New York City.

"Professor Van Doodle claimed that under woman suffrage only a
good-looking candidate would stand a chance of being elected. Mrs.
Excelsior replied that there was no reason for believing that women
would be more particular in choosing a State Senator than in selecting a
husband. The professor was foolish when he asserted that if women went
to the polls they would vote for the aldermen and the sheriffs, and
would forget to vote for the President of the United States, and would
insist on doing so in a postscript. This was of a piece with the other
ancient jest that women are sure to vote for a Democrat when at heart
they prefer a Republican, and _vice versa_.

"The whole case," concluded Harding, "was summed up by the Rev. Dr.
Hollow when he said that in theory there is no objection to the present
arrangement by which man rules the earth through his reason, and woman
rules man through his stomach; but unfortunately, the human reason and
the average man's stomach are apt to get out of order."

XXXIV

THE GERMS OF CULTURE

In my afternoon paper there was a letter by Veritas who tried to prove
something about the Trusts by quoting from the third volume of
Macaula