orld is new and strange. Have you observed
any alteration in the manner of men toward women? If so, is it in the
direction of greater rudeness or of more ceremonious respect? And again,
if so, has not the change, in point of time, been coincident with the
genesis and development of woman's "emancipation" and her triumphal
entry into the field of "affairs"? Are you really desirous that the
change go further? Or do you think that when women are armed with the
ballot they will compel a return of the old _regime_ of deference
and delicate consideration--extorting by their power the tribute once
voluntarily paid to their weakness? Is there any known way by which
women can at once be our political equals and our social superiors, our
competitors in the sharp and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread,
and the objects of our unselfish and undiminished devotion? The present
predicts the future; of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitive
female hearts feel the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory,
some women enjoy under this _regime_ of partial "emancipation" all women
pay. Of the coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters of
the sex have not a groat and can bear the situation with impunity. They
have either passed the age of masculine attention or were born without
the means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can afford
to defy eviction.

While men did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world,
setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with true
sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves, as a
very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity which
was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better, generally,
than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but their goodness
was supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and more or less
independent of environmental influences.

We are changing all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing
and public speaking, and not only are they going to extol us (to the
fattening of our conceit) but they are bound to disclose, even to the
unthinking, certain defects of character in themselves which their
silence had veiled. Their competition, too, in several kinds of affairs
will slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them
to temptations which will distinctly lower the morality of their
sex. All these changes, and many mo