t the leaders will not stop with the ballot
for women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity
for them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing
of womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a
masculine harlotocracy.

Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman's battles in one way and
another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would
discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the
franchise to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to
charities, corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of
politics. I do not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help
thinking that in seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women
who favor it are off their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up
to exploit it, though somehow, when the hikers started from New York to
Albany, and afterward from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought
of Bertha von Hillern came back to me.

I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let
me tell it. Many years ago--don't ask me how many--there was a young
woman, Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money
enough to take her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in
Louisville to walk one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four
consecutive hours. She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told,
amounted to three thousand dollars.

I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage
and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized,
but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution,
though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish,
began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the
enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every
footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the
final lap was reached.

More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was
carried off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human
sympathy, every eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible
adequately to describe all that happened. One must have been there and
seen it fully to comprehend the glory of it.

Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say
at once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women