m the soldiers she
had befriended. Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Louisa Alcott, came to the claim for the ballot earlier than a million
others, because they were the intellectual leaders of American womanhood.
They saw farthest, because they were in the highest place. They were the
recognized representatives of their sex before they gave in their adhesion
to the new demand. Their judgment is as the judgment of the council of
officers, while Flora McFlimsey's opinion is as the opinion of John Smith,
unassigned recruit. But if the generals make arrangements for a battle, the
chance is that John Smith will have to take a hand in it, or else run away.

It is a rare thing for the petition for suffrage from any town to comprise
the majority of women in that town. It makes no difference: if there are
few women in the town who want to vote, there is as much propriety in their
voting as if there were ten millions, so long as the majority are equally
protected in their right to stay at home. But when the names of petitioners
come to be weighed as well as counted, the character, the purity, the
intelligence, the social and domestic value of the petitioners is seldom
denied. The women who wish to vote are not the idle, the ignorant, the
narrow-minded, or the vicious; they are not "the dangerous classes:" they
represent the best class in the community, when tried by the highest
standard. They are the natural leaders. What they now see to be right will
also be perceived even by the foolish and the ignorant by and by.

In a poultry-yard in spring, when the first brood of duckling's goes
toddling to the waterside, no doubt all the younger or feebler broods, just
hatched out of similar eggs, think these innovators dreadfully mistaken.
"You are out of place," they feebly pipe. "See how happy we are in our safe
nests. Perhaps, by and by, when properly introduced into society, we may
run about a little on land, but to swim!--never!" Meanwhile their elder
kindred are splashing and diving in ecstasy; and, so surely as they are
born ducklings, all the rest will swim in their turn. The instinct of the
first duck solves the problem for all the rest. It is a mere question of
time. Sooner or later, all the broods in the most conservative yard will
follow their leaders.

HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS

An English member of Parliament said in a speech, some years ago, that the
stupidest man had a cleare