this is one of the successful laborers, where shall we place
the unsuccessful; or, rather, is success, or failure, the greater honor?

Personal journalism has a prominence in this country with which nothing in
any other country can be compared. What is called publicity in England or
France means the most peaceful seclusion, compared with the glare of
notoriety which an enterprising correspondent can flash out at any time--as
if by opening the bull's-eye of a dark lantern--upon the quietest of his
contemporaries. It is essentially an American institution, and not one of
those in which we have reason to feel most pride. It is to be observed,
however, that foreigners, if in office, take to it very readily; and it is
said that no people cultivate the reporters at Washington more assiduously
than the diplomatic corps, who like to send home the personal notices of
themselves, in order to prove to their governments that they are highly
esteemed in the land to which they are appointed. But however it may be
with them, it is certain that many people still like to keep their public
and private lives apart, and shrink from even the inevitable eminence of
fame. One of the very most popular of American authors has said that he
never, to this day, has overcome a slight feeling of repugnance on seeing
his own name in print.

TALKING AND TAKING

Every time a woman does anything original or remarkable,--inventing a
rat-trap, let us say, or carving thirty-six heads on a walnut-shell,--all
observers shout applause. "There's a woman for you, indeed! Instead of
talking about her rights, she takes them. That's the way to do it. What a
lesson to these declaimers upon the platform!"

It does not seem to occur to these wise people that the right to talk is
itself one of the chief rights in America, and the way to reach all the
others. To talk is to make a beginning, at any rate. To catch people with
your ideas is more than to contrive a rat-trap; and Isotta Nogarola,
carving thirty-six empty heads, was not working in so practical a fashion
as Mary Livermore when she instructs thirty-six hundred full ones.

It shows the good sense of the woman-suffrage agitators, that they have
decided to begin with talk. In the first place, talking is the most
lucrative of all professions in America; and therefore it is the duty of
American women to secure their share of it. Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble used
to say that she read Shakespeare in public "f