e equality of races,
death to the slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at the North,
William Lowndes Yancey was exclaiming that cotton was king at the South,
and, to establish these false propositions, millions of good Americans
proceeded to cut one another's throats.

There were agitators and agitators in those days as there are in these.
The agitator, like the poor, we have always with us. It used to be said
even at the North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever comedian.
William Lowndes Yancey was scarcely that. He was a serious, sincere,
untraveled provincial, possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He had the
misfortune to kill a friend in a duel when a young man, and the tragedy
shadowed his life. He clung to his plantation and rarely went away from
home. When sent to Europe by the South as its Ambassador in 1861, he
discovered the futility of his scheme of a Southern confederacy, and,
seeing the cornerstone of the philosophy on which he had constructed his
pretty fabric, overthrown, he came home despairing, to die of a broken
heart.

The moral alike for governments and men is: Keep the middle of the road.

III

Which brings us to Feminism. I will not write Woman Suffrage, for that
is an accomplished fact--for good or evil we shall presently be better
able to determine.

Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers--saving that the word
presses somewhat harder upon the woman than the man--most things do in
fact, whereby she is given greater endurance--leaving to men the duty
of caring for the women; and, if need be, looking death squarely and
defiantly in the face.

The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under
the dispensation of the Christian civilization--derived from the
Hebraic--the family requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male.
This male is commonly not much to speak of for beauty of form or decency
of behavior. He is made purposely tough for work and fight. He gets
toughened by outer contact. But back of all are the women, the children
and the home.

I have been fighting the woman's battle for equality in the things
that count, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In
contesting precipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I
was still fighting the woman's battle.

We can escape none of Nature's laws. But we need not handicap ourselves
with artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the final
adventure. Feminism s