e a state of things in which we
had actually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real sovereign and
a nobility and a court, and the rest of the tradition. With a sudden
severity we should ask where, since they could not all be of the highest
rank, our women would consent to strike the procession of precedence?
How, with their inborn and inbred notions of the deference due their
sex, with that pride of womanhood which our republican chivalry has
cherished in them, they would like, when they went to court, to stand,
for hours perhaps, while a strong young man, or a fat old man, or a
robust man in the prime of life, remained seated in the midst of them?
Would it flatter their hopes of distinction to find the worst scenes of
trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the highest social function in
the land, with not even a hanging-strap to support their weariness,
their weakness, or, if we must say it, their declining years? Would the
glory of being part of a spectacle testifying in our time to the
meanness and rudeness of the past be a compensation for the aching legs
and breaking backs under the trailing robes and the nodding plumes of a
court dress?"

"That would be a telling stroke," our visitor said, "but wouldn't it be
a stroke retold? It doesn't seem to me very new."

"No matter," we said. "The question is not what a thing is, but how it
is done. You asked how we should treat a given subject, and we have
answered."

"And is that all you could make of it?"

"By no means. As subjects are never exhausted, so no subject is ever
exhausted. We could go on with this indefinitely. We could point out
that the trouble was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little;
that women's civic equality with men was perhaps the next step, and not
the social inequality among persons of both sexes. Without feeling that
it affected our position, we would acknowledge that there was now
greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great Britain than in a
republic like the United States; with shame we would acknowledge it; but
we would never admit that it was so because of the monarchism of the
first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally be very
earnest with this phase of our subject, and we should urge our fair
readers to realize that citizenship was a duty as well as a right. We
should ask them before accepting the suffrage to consider its
responsibilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing attitude of
the