s treated me with exemplary fairness, and
I certainly have never maintained that the blockhead majority is
entirely composed of men; neither have I ever insinuated that it is man
that makes all the misery.

Personally, and speaking as a woman whose guiding principle through life
has been never to do anything for herself that she can get a nice man to
do for her [laughter], a principle which I have found entirely
successful, and which I strongly recommend to every other
woman--personally I have always found mere man an excellent comrade.
[Applause.] He has stood by me loyally, and held out an honest hand to
me, and lent me his strength when mine was failing, and helped me
gallantly over many an awkward bit of the way, and that, too, at times
when sovran woman, whom I had so respected and admired and championed,
had nothing for me but bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] It does upset one's
ideas and unsettle one's principles when sovran woman has nothing for
one but bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] The sharp points of those pins have
made me a little doubtful about sovran woman at times--a little apt to
suspect that in private life her name is Mrs. Harris [laughter], but I
must be careful about what I say in this connection lest it should be
supposed that I have been perverted.

In the great republic of letters to which I have the honor to belong--in
the distinguished position of the letter "Z"--my experience is that
woman suffers no indignity at the hands of man on account of her sex.
That is the sort of experience which creates a prejudice. It is apt to
color the whole of one's subsequent opinions. It gives one a sort of
idea that there are men in the world who would stand by a woman on
occasion; and I must confess that I began life with a very strong
prejudice of that kind. For a woman to have had a good father is to have
been born an heiress. If you had asked me as a child who ran to help me
when I fell, I should have answered, "My daddy." When a woman begins
life with a prejudice of this kind she never gets over it. The prejudice
of a man for his mother is feeble in comparison with the prejudice of a
woman for her father, when she has had a man for her father and not one
of what Shelley called, those--

"Things whose trade is over ladies
To lean and flirt and stare and simper,
Till all that is divine in woman
Grows cruel, courteous, smooth, inhuman,
Crucified 'twixt a smile and whimper."'

Whatever that woman has to