e were no women in
the world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically
all men are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities--for
example, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure--to which
women are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them from such
celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in front of the hound.
The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist alarmists
talk about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in the world,
and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their teeth, and put them in
khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear scents, or
to use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual, mistakes the
fish for the fly.

33. A Glance Into the Future

The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly due
to the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very
stupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women, and so
show them politeness. But soon or late--and probably disconcertingly
soon--the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon them
and depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no longer at
the disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes
continue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has been
effected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots, like
the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and
other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension
of the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before the
national enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nation
at large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not taken
in by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their shell of
logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one
woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by
some swindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculine
witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia
Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for
specifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are
chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men.

My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is that
the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the less
real beginning