Part 23

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That ancient skull found in England proves conclusively, so the anthropologists say, that man had reason before he spoke. Well, well! What a revolution has taken place since those prehistoric days!

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A Paris jeweler has invented a ring to be worn by the divorced—two marriage rings intertwined in the form of a cross. Very inappropriate, when the wearers have just laid down their cross.

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A Russian woman has just started to explore an Arabian desert of thousands of miles, which no European has ever entered. How thankful she should be that the heavy burden of casting a ballot has not been imposed on her!

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The first thing the women of Oregon did with their brand-new ballots was to cast them against letting foreigners vote on their “first papers,” which they had always done. Did somebody remark that women are too radical to be trusted with the suffrage?

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A Baptist minister in Chicago has opened in his church a school of home training to make women more desirable for wives. That school had better be closed by the authorities for women are so “desirable” already that school boards, theater managers, telegraph and telephone heads, even the government, are requiring those they employ to guarantee that they will not marry within a specified time. A school to make women less desirable—that is the need of the hour.

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A Cincinnati legislator has introduced a bill for a commission to “prescribe the fashions to be worn by women in the State of Ohio.” One good thing about it would be that when it came to appointing officials to enforce the rules not an office-seeker in the State would be left without a job.

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New York’s commissioner of corrections suggests that the one hundred and seventy-five wife beaters on Blackwell’s Island be put to making creosoted paving blocks. Good idea! The perfume will remind them of what awaits them after their exit from this world of inadequate punishment.

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That Englishman who was put into jail because he had no money to pay the taxes on his wife’s property must have a poor opinion of the law-making ability of his sex. Women couldn’t do any worse, unless they condemned the poor husband to death.

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The Norwegian Parliament first gave municipal suffrage to women taxpayers; then gave them the Parliamentary franchise; then it removed the taxpaying qualification for the municipal vote. Its next step was to make them eligible for all political offices. Then it granted them the right to speak in the State church, but would not allow them to preach; now it proposes to let them hold the Church offices. Lastly it gave the complete franchise to all women. There are only a few more inches to cut off and the State is bearing up as well as could be expected.

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The young men of Cairo who have returned from European universities have begun a crusade to “emancipate” the Moslem women from the veil. Let us believe they are wholly disinterested.

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A woman who kept a grocery wanted to decorate her show windows in the anti-suffrage colors but she had no American Beauty roses, so she put in a lot of red lobsters. To make it still more appropriate she should have added some clams.

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The English government has just raised the pay of the men clerks in the post-offices and reduced the pay of the women clerks to half that received by the men. To be sure hatchets are no argument but sometimes they express people’s feelings better than logic.

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“Since the Prince of Wales left his mother,” say the press dispatches, “he has become a ‘man’ in the best sense of the word. He drives his car beyond the speed limit and is rarely seen without a pipe in his mouth.” How fine! It shows that he is rapidly developing the qualities necessary for a great ruler.

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Seven men in one precinct in a Kansas town had to get the election officers to mark their ballots, and all voted against the woman-suffrage amendment. Those officials were still more obliging in some of the Michigan towns, it is said, for they gathered up all the ballots that were left over and voted them against this amendment.