thousand subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have got a
subject, you had better take it to the country press; the New York
magazines and reviews are overstocked with them; the newspapers,
morning and evening, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are
turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot get standing-room
in the theatres. Why, we have just this moment dismissed a subject of
the first interest. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting one
lady friend of votes for women declared herself an admirer of monarchies
because they always gave women more recognition, more honor, than
republics?"

"No, I haven't," our visitor said.

"Well, it happened," we affirmed. "But every nook and cranny of our
brain was so full of subjects that we simply could not give this a
moment's consideration, and we see that all the other editors in New
York were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though they must have
felt, as we did, that it was of prime importance."

From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, and began to nurse
one of his knees between his clasped hands. "But if," he asked, "you had
been able to consider the subject, what should you have said?"

"There are a great many ways of considering a subject like that," we
replied. "We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how far
the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American
marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with
monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such
marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of
the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the heart of American
motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to the
point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and
titles and the splendor of court life."

"Wouldn't you have been rather mixing your metaphors?" our visitor
asked, with an air of having followed us over a difficult country.

"In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would have minded mixing
his metaphors. He would have felt that the great thing was to keep his
motives pure; and in treating such a subject our motives would have
remained the purest, whatever became of our metaphors. At the same time
this would not have prevented our doing justice to the position taken by
that friend of votes for women. We should have frankly acknowledged that
there was a great deal