al place among
her sex; yet in one respect she is still unique, and it is to be hoped
will long remain so. That singularity is her influence and part in
politics.

All of us know the constant political cataclysms that occur in South
America. It is said that a Spanish-American lady who not long ago
visited New York looked with some surprise upon the arrogance of one of
the _grandes dames_ of the city and inquired the reason. "Why, my dear,"
replied her interlocutor, "she is a Daughter of the Revolution!" "Oh,
_ca!_" replied the charming South American, with a shrug: "Is that all?
For me, I am the daughter of at least six!" The anecdote may be
apocryphal, but it is none the less pointed; and the constant
revolutions of the South American states have become fair matter for
jest. In these turbulent ebullitions of racial spirit rather than
national liberty the fair senoritas and senoras have had a most
prominent part. Not only have they incited and encouraged the men who
bore the brunt of the actual combat, but, if those who know most of the
inner histories of these affairs of state are to be believed, the women
have been the most efficient as well as the most ardent plotters. In
fact, it may be said that of late years, say for the latter half of the
past century, politics has become with South American women as much a
fashion as literature was in France at the time of the great _salons_.
She who had never plotted was at one time--not yet entirely passed
away--beyond the social pale, while she who was fortunate enough to
include among the visitors to her political _salon_ some especially
virulent revolutionist was regarded with as much envy as, in circles of
other nationality, is the exhibitor of some literary lion of
particularly loud roar. We often hear the expression, "the game of
politics"; but certainly it has never been so well applied as to the
somewhat dangerous but entirely conventional pursuits of the female
plotters and revolutionists of South America. That these women, of whom
none has bequeathed to posterity a name worthy of record, have been of
some influence in regulating the course of South American events it is
impossible to deny; but their methods have not, as a rule, been such as
to call forth high eulogium of feminine politics. They have been for the
most part on a plane with the female Nihilists of Russia, save that the
latter are in deadly earnest, while the South American ladies play at
politics as th