g.

It is a mistaken system. Once recognize woman as born to be the equal, not
inferior, of man, and she accepts as a right her share of the family
income, of political power, and of all else that is capable of
distribution. As it is, we are in danger of forgetting that woman, in mind
as in body, was-born to be upright. The women of Charles Reade--never by
any possibility moving in a straight line where it is possible to find a
crooked one--are distorted women; and Nature is no more responsible for
them than for the figures produced by tight lacing and by high-heeled
boots. These physical deformities acquire a charm, when the taste adjusts
itself to them; and so do those pretty tricks and those interminable lies.
But after all, to make a noble woman you must give a noble training.

VIII

SUFFRAGE

"No such phrase as virtual representation was ever known in law or
constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly
unfounded and absurd. We must not be cheated by any such phantom or
any other trick of law and politics."--JAMES OTIS, quoted by Charles
Sumner in speech, March 7, 1866.

DRAWING THE LINE

When in Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby" the coal-heaver calls at the
fashionable barber's to be shaved, the barber declines that service. The
coal-heaver pleads that he saw a baker being shaved there the day before.
But the barber points out to him that it is necessary to draw the line
somewhere, and he draws it at bakers.

It is, doubtless, an inconvenience, in respect to woman suffrage, that so
many people have their own theories as to drawing the line, and deciding
who shall vote. Each has his hobby; and as the opportunity for applying it
to men has passed by, each wishes to catch at the last remaining chance,
and apply it to women. One believes in drawing an educational line;
another, in a property qualification; another, in new restrictions on
naturalization; another, in distinctions of race; and each wishes to keep
women, for a time, as the only remaining victims for his experiment.

Fortunately the answer to all these objections, on behalf of woman
suffrage, is very brief and simple. It is no more the business of its
advocates to decide upon the best abstract basis for suffrage, than it is
to decide upon the best system of education, or of labor, or of marriage.
Its business is to equalize, in all these directions; nothing more. When
that is done, there will be plenty st