hall in every
town for the one, and a newspaper in every village for the other, he has
such advantages over his ignorant neighbors that the only doubt is whether
his privileges are not greater than he deserves. For one, in writing for
the press, I am impressed by the undue greatness, not by the littleness, of
the power I wield. And what is true of men will be true of women. If the
educated women of America have not brains or energy enough to control, in
the long run, the votes of the ignorant women around them, they will
deserve a severe lesson, and will be sure, like the men in New York, to
receive it. And thenceforward they will educate and guide that ignorance,
instead of evading or cringing before it.

But I have no fear about the matter. It is a libel on American women to say
that they will not go anywhere or do anything which is for the good of
their children and their husbands. Travel West on any of our great lines of
railroad, and see what women undergo in transporting their households to
their new homes. See the watching and the feeding, and the endless answers
to the endless questions, and the toil to keep little Sarah warm, and
little Johnny cool, and the baby comfortable. What a hungry, tired, jaded,
forlorn mass of humanity it is, as the sun rises on it each morning, in the
soiled and breathless railway-car! Yet that household group is America in
the making; those are the future kings and queens, the little princes and
princesses, of this land. Now, is the mother who has undergone for the
transportation of these children all this enormous labor to shrink at her
journey's end from the slight additional labor of going to the polls to
vote whether those little ones shall have schools or rumshops? The thought
is an absurdity. A few fine ladies in cities will fear to spoil their silk
dresses, as a few foppish gentlemen now fear for their broadcloth. But the
mass of intelligent American women will vote, as do the mass of men.

FOLLOW YOUR LEADERS

"There go thirty thousand men," shouted the Portuguese, as Wellington, with
a few staff-officers, rode along the mountain-side. The action of the
leaders' minds, in any direction, has a value out of all proportion to
their numbers. In a campaign there is a council of officers,--Grant and
Sherman and Sheridan perhaps. They are but a trifling minority, yet what
they plan the whole army will do; and such is the faith in a real leader,
that, were all the restraint