lives, and men connected with the saloons."
Certainly, the lady vote gatherers can not be accused of much sense
of proportion. Granting even that these busybodies can decide whose
lives are clean enough for that eminently clean atmosphere, politics,
must it follow that saloon-keepers belong to the same category?
Unless it be American hypocrisy and bigotry, so manifest in the
principle of Prohibition, which sanctions the spread of drunkenness
among men and women of the rich class, yet keeps vigilant watch on
the only place left to the poor man. If no other reason, woman's
narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to
liberty wherever she has political power. Man has long overcome the
superstitions that still engulf woman. In the economic competitive
field, man has been compelled to exercise efficiency, judgment,
ability, competency. He therefore had neither time nor inclination
to measure everyone's morality with a Puritanic yardstick. In his
political activities, too, he has not gone about blindfolded. He
knows that quantity and not quality is the material for the political
grinding mill, and, unless he is a sentimental reformer or an old
fossil, he knows that politics can never be anything but a swamp.

Women who are at all conversant with the process of politics, know
the nature of the beast, but in their self-sufficiency and egotism
they make themselves believe that they have but to pet the beast, and
he will become as gentle as a lamb, sweet and pure. As if women have
not sold their votes, as if women politicians can not be bought! If
her body can be bought in return for material consideration, why not
her vote? That it is being done in Colorado and in other States, is
not denied even by those in favor of woman suffrage.

As I have said before, woman's narrow view of human affairs is not
the only argument against her as a politician superior to man. There
are others. Her life-long economic parasitism has utterly blurred
her conception of the meaning of equality. She clamors for equal
rights with men, yet we learn that "few women care to canvas in
undesirable districts."[3] How little equality means to them compared
with the Russian women, who face hell itself for their ideal!

Woman demands the same rights as man, yet she is indignant that her
presence does not strike him dead: he smokes, keeps his hat on, and
does not jump from his seat like a flunkey. These may be trivial
t