is essentially a contention) will allay any animosities,
sweeten any tempers, elevate any motives. The strifes of women are
distinctly meaner than those of men--which are out of all reason mean;
their methods of overcoming opponents distinctly more unscrupulous. That
their participation in politics will notably alter the conditions of the
game is not to be denied; that, unfortunately, is obvious; but that it
will make the player less malignant and the playing more honorable is
a proposition in support of which one can utter a deal of gorgeous
nonsense, with a less insupportable sense of its unfitness, than in the
service of any other delusion.

The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women is
not elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who need
uplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that is
accomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who are
not their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they do not
affect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with ours.

In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundred
avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by an
unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories.
Like Charles Lamb's fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner of
streets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advance
in professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyers
more scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been served by a
"saleslady" does one leave the shop with a feebler sense of injury
than was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter--a duller
consciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed hands?
Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial to the
colder virtues? In studios of the artists is the "sound of revelry by
night" invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the immoral
books--the books "dealing" with questionable "questions"--always, or
even commonly, written by men?

There is one direction in which "emancipation of woman" and enlargement
of her "sphere" have wrought a reform: they have elevated the
_personnel_ of the little dinner party in the "private room." Formerly,
as any veteran man-about-town can testify, if he will, the female
contingent of the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable.
That element now remains upon its reservatio