ect the direct offer of a dollar bill.

But this is all private speculation, and has nothing to do with the
woman-suffrage movement. All that we can ask, as advocates of this reform,
is that the inclusion or the exclusion should be the same for both sexes.
We cannot put off the equality of woman till that time, a few centuries
hence, when the Social Science Association shall have succeeded in agreeing
on the true basis of "scientific legislation." It is as if we urged that
wives should share their husbands' dinners, and were told that the
physicians had not decided whether beefsteak were wholesome. The answer
is, "Beefsteak or tripe, yeast or saleratus, which you please. But,
meanwhile, what is good enough for the wife is good enough for the
husband."

FOR SELF-PROTECTION

I remember to have read, many years ago, the life of Sir Samuel Romilly,
the English philanthropist. He was the author of more beneficent legal
reforms than any man of his day, and there was in that very book a long
list of the changes he still meant to bring about. It struck me very much,
that among these proposed reforms not one of any importance referred to the
laws about women.

It shows--what all experience has shown--that no class or race or sex can
safely trust its protection in any hands but its own. The laws of England
in regard to woman were then so bad that Lord Brougham afterwards said they
needed total reconstruction, if they were to be touched at all. Yet it is
only since woman suffrage began to be talked about, that the work of
law-reform has really taken firm hold. In many cases in America the
beneficent measures are directly to be traced to some appeal from feminine
advocates. Even in Canada, as was once stated by Dr. Cameron of Toronto,
the bill protecting the property of married women was passed under the
immediate pressure of Lucy Stone's eloquence. And even where this direct
agency could not be traced, the general fact that the atmosphere was full
of the agitation had much to do with all the reforms that took place.
Legislatures, unwilling to give woman the ballot, were shamed into giving
her something. The chairman of the judiciary committee in Rhode Island told
me that until he heard women argue before the committee he had not
reflected upon their legal disabilities, or thought how unjust these were.
While the matter was left to the other sex only, even men like Sir Samuel
Romilly forgot the wrongs of woman. When she