within their own small circle,--a temptation quite different from the
other, both in its origin and its results.

Notoriety comes so soon to a reformer that its charms, whatever they may
be, soon pall upon the palate, just as they do in case of a popular poet or
orator, who is so used to seeing himself in print that he hardly notices
it. I suppose there is no young person so modest that he does not, on first
seeing his name in a newspaper, cut out the passage with a certain tender
solicitude, and perhaps purchase a few extra copies of the fortunate
journal. But when the same person has been battered by a score or two of
years in successive unpopular reforms, I suppose that he not only would
leave the paper uncut or unpurchased, but would hardly take the pains even
to correct a misstatement, were it asserted that he had inherited a fortune
or murdered his grandmother. The moral is that the love of notoriety is
soon amply filled, in a reformer's experience, and that he will not, as a
rule, sacrifice home and comfort, money and friends, without some stronger
inducement. This is certainly true of most of the men who have interested
themselves in this particular movement, the "weak-minded men," as the
reporters, with witty antithesis, still describe them; and it must be much
the same with the "strong-minded women" who share their base career.

And it is to be remembered, above all, that, considered as an engine for
obtaining notoriety, the woman-suffrage agitation is a great waste of
energy. The same net result could have been won with far less expenditure
in other ways. There is not a woman connected with it who could not have
achieved far more real publicity as a manager of charity fairs or as a
sensation letter-writer. She could have done this, too, with far less
trouble, without the loss of a single genteel friend, without forfeiting a
single social attention, without having a single ill-natured thing said
about her--except perhaps that she bored people, a charge to which the
highest and lowest forms of prominence are equally open. Nay, she might
have done even more than this, if notoriety was her sole aim: for she might
have become a "variety" minstrel or a female pedestrian; she might have
written a scandalous novel; she might have got somebody to aim at her that
harmless pistol, which has helped the fame of so many a wandering actress,
while its bullet somehow never hits anything but the wall. All this she
might have