perators, in the kindness of their hearts, had
actually had the looms made especially to accommodate conveniently the
diminutive size of the little workers. Some people might, with great
profit to themselves, read Plato's superb allegory of the men in the
cave.

The fact that various women's associations have been instituted in
opposition to the extension of woman suffrage--as in Boston and New
York--is no argument for depriving all women of the franchise. If the
women who compose these societies do not care to vote, they do not need
to; but they have no right to deprive of their rights those who do so
desire. It is said that good women will not go to the polls; yet there
are in every large city hundreds of respectable males who disdain to
vote. A woman is more likely to have a sense of duty to vote than a man.
It is the old cry, "Don't disturb the old order of things. If you make
us think for ourselves, we shall be so unhappy." So Galileo was brought
to trial, so Anne Hutchinson was banished; and so persecuted they the
prophets before them.

IV. Another argument that is made much of is the intellectual
inferiority of woman. For ages women were allowed nor higher education
than reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, often not even these; yet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, George Eliot, Harriet
Martineau, Jane Austen, and some scores of others did work which showed
them to be the peers of any minds of their day. And if no woman can
justly claim to have attained an eminence such as that of Shakespeare in
letters or of Darwin in science, we may question whether Shakespeare
would have been Shakespeare or Darwin Darwin if the society which
surrounded them had insisted that it was a sin for them to use their
minds and that they should not presume to meddle with knowledge. When a
girl for the first time in America took a public examination in
geometry, in 1829, men wagged their heads gravely and prophesied the
speedy dissolution of family and state.

To the list of women whose service for their fellows would have been
lost if the old-time barriers had been maintained, may be added the name
of the late Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. Mary Putnam secured her preliminary
medical education in the early '60's, and found herself keenly troubled
and dissatisfied at the inadequacy of the facilities extended to women
for the study of medicine. She insisted that if women practitioners were
to be, as she expressed it, "turned loos