Part 27

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His name is Abnel—a German doctor who has made a discovery. “The world’s well-being is threatened by the adoration of suffragists for dissolute men. The clinging, domestic women are naturally attracted to strong men.” Of course—the men would have to be strong to support their weight. “But the women politicians have lost the selective instinct,” he says. “They flutter toward the Don Juans like moths and are consumed before they realize their own folly.” Yes, people notice this in those Western States—a perfect holocaust as soon as women get the ballot. That is why the Don Juans always vote against it—they would feel so dreadfully helpless with all the women politicians fluttering toward them in order to be consumed.

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Which is likely to do more damage to the sweetly feminine character—to stand at the polls all day and hand out coffee to voters, or to deposit a ballot and then go home and attend to woman’s legitimate business?

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A cardinal in Venice denounced the tight skirts women are wearing and ordered them to do penance. They hastened to church the next day for the purpose, but were obliged to perform their devotions standing!

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The New Thought devotees have thought out a new kind of marriage—“a mating of harmonious vibrations.” But that has been the trouble with marriage in late years—the parties have vibrated among too many people.

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A Chicago suffrage club has just been formed, to which only young, unmarried women are eligible. It seems only yesterday that girls were solemnly admonished that if they advocated woman suffrage no man would marry them, but they can’t be scared that way now.

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Richard Le Gallienne has gone Omar Khayyam’s “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou, singing in the wilderness underneath a bough,” one better. He will be perfectly satisfied “if only she and I can go, walking forever through the snow.” Maybe he would, but we think the lady would want something warmer even than Richard’s poetry.

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There was an increase of fifteen per cent. in marriages in Chicago the first six months after the Legislature granted woman suffrage. That may not have been the cause but if the figures had gone the other way there would have had to be a special session to repeal it.

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The New York Times suggests that “the suffragists have the right of petition and by exercising it in a proper manner they may advance their cause.” They have been doing this for sixty-five years. If there is any new style in petitions they will be very thankful for a diagram and a paper pattern.

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Anti-suffragists are protesting against having that vote for suffrage at the biennial called unanimous. All right; say that twenty-one hundred votes were cast, and seventy of them were negative—thirty in favor to one opposed—and that is just about the way the woman’s vote would stand throughout the country.

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Pittsburgh is to have a saloon exclusively for women, as they have been crowded out of the others by the men. Promoters of the new idea should go to New York and inquire at the Hotel Vanderbilt, which started out with a beautiful “bar” for women, but a month later it was closed for lack of patronage and reopened as a much needed annex to the large and flourishing bar for men.

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Prof. Spencer Baldwin, of Boston University, is an anti-suffragist. He doesn’t like the new woman—“androgynous hybrid,” that is what he calls her. It’s up to the professor to find an anti-toxin.

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In the United States the women say they won’t pay their taxes if they can’t vote and in London they say they won’t pay their rent. Our government can compromise with them by giving the suffrage but what is their landlord to do?

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The head of the “vocational bureau” in Boston thinks the time may come when graduation certificates in fathercraft and mothercraft will be issued by the public schools. But if the holders don’t get aboard the matrimonial craft what good will these do?

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Hampton Court has been closed to the public for a long time through fear of the suffragettes; but the government has at last evolved a scheme—it will open the palace and charge a shilling admission! How clever! But suppose a suffragette should be able to borrow a shilling?