ocket-books and they got them, and
petticoat government became a probability. Not satisfied with the
pocket-books, they are now going for the business by means of which we
fill the books, and oh, what a hankering they have for public pap! They
stick to the curtain lecture business, but now they do it before the
curtain. Alas, petticoat government is now a certainty!

It's all very well for you to talk about the grandeur of the governments
of BOADICEA, and ELIZABETH and CATHERINE, but I don't believe that BOA,
or LIZZY, or KATE would have been very nice as a companion, if she and
you were sitting before the fire, and she wanted stamps and was going
for them as a matter of business. Besides, there was only one of them at
a time, and they didn't trouble common people much, but in this
enlightened nineteenth century I have seen a poor, miserable, six foot
dry-goods clerk turned out of a retail store by a strapping little
female, who couldn't jump a counter worth shucks. I have seen him in his
misery industriously study "What I Know About Farming," squat on a farm
in the West, and bring himself, his wife, and four miserable offshoots
to the alms-house by endeavoring to apply the rules set down in "What I
Know About Farming" to 160 acres of land. I have seen the poor,
half-paid type-setters strike for their altars, their sires, and more
wages, and I have seen a troop of petticoats, with gal children inside
them, trot into the type-setter's place, so that the miserable
compositors were compelled to return and starve on four or five dollars
a day. That's petticoat government with a vengeance. Putting your nose
to the grindstone isn't nice at any time, but it's awful when the gal
children turn.

But that is only the beginning. They have struck for bigger things. In
the expressive language of the immortal JOHNNY MILTON, they are going
for the whole hog. They want to vote; some of them have been caught
repeating already; they want to sit on juries, and they want to go to
Congress. Heaven forbid that any of them should ever reach the House of
Representatives! Imagine the size of the _Congressional Globe_ if we
should send women there! Why, there would be as great a dearth of paper
in Washington as there is now in Paris. They want to shave you, dress
you, doctor you into your coffins, preach a funeral discourse over your
remains, and then take your will into the Surrogate's Court and fight
over the little property they have left yo