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name of the gentlemen. She spoke of them in high and eloquent terms. She
alluded to their usefulness, their courage, their good looks. She did
them full justice as resources in times of trouble, of war and of
midnight burglaries.

The county clerk ran his fingers through his hair, the color came into
the cheeks of the clergyman, and a subdued murmur as of pleasure ran
through the little group in the gallery.

Then the baroness continued. She said she was not a woman-suffragist--at
least she wasn't sure that she was. She had, she thanked her stars, her
own opinion upon most matters, but while she had no positive objection
to right-minded women having any real or fancied wrongs redressed, and
in their own way, she had not yet thought clearly enough upon the
subject to be sure that the ballot was the remedy. She knew there was a
great deal of nonsense talked about the moral influence women would
exert in politics: perhaps they would, but to her it seemed very much
like watering potato-blossoms to get rid of the worms at the root.

Here the county clerk half rose, but the head-teacher held him with his
disciplining eye, and he sat down again.

What was needed, said the baroness, was not mending, regenerating,
giving freedom or doing justice. These things were all very good, but
more was necessary. "There is no remedy," she said with rising
inflections and with emphasis--"no remedy but a total change. What we
want is not an extension of the suffrage, but a _limitation_!"

She wished it, however, distinctly understood that she in no way meant
to affirm that woman was man's superior: she did not think so. In his
own place man could not be surpassed. The sciences, the arts, the
industrial pursuits, religion, civilization, all owed a deep debt to
man, and it could not be ignored. She was the last person in the world
to wish to ignore it. Properly governed, disciplined and educated, his
development might outrun hope, defy prophecy. Out of his place he was a
comet without an orbit. Drawn hither and thither by sinister stars, he
was an eccentricity beyond calculation and full of harm. For this reason
the interests of humanity demanded that the place of man in the conduct
of affairs should be well defined and limited. It was well to look this
matter in the face.

"Now," proceeded the baroness, "I leave it to any class of men, to any
one man, to declare whether the world is, or ever has been, well
governed. Is there any age,