very phrases used to soften the mention of any degrading creature.  Mr. Leland tells us that among the English gypsies any object that a woman treads upon, or sweeps with the skirts of her dress, is destroyed or made away with in some way, as unfit for use.  In reading the history of manners, it is easy to trace the steps from this degradation up to the point now attained, such as it is.  Yet even the habit of physiological contempt is not gone, and I do not see how any one can read history without seeing, all around us, in society, education, and politics, the tradition of inferiority.  Many laws and usages which in themselves might not strike all women as intrinsically worth striving for—­as the exclusion of women from colleges or from the ballot-box—­assume great importance to a woman’s self-respect, when she sees in these the plain survival of the same contempt that once took much grosser forms.

And it must be remembered that in civilized communities the cynics, who still frankly express this utter contempt, are better friends to women than the flatterers, who conceal it in the drawing-room, and only utter it freely in the lecture-room, the club, and the “North American Review.”  Contempt at least arouses pride and energy.  To be sure, in the face of history, the contemptuous tone in regard to women seems to me untrue, unfair, and dastardly; but, like any other extreme injustice, it leads to reaction.  It helps to awaken women from that shallow dream of self-complacency into which flattery lulls them.  There is something tonic in the manly arrogance of Fitzjames Stephen, who derides the thought that the marriage contract can be treated as in any sense a contract between equals; but there is something that debilitates in the dulcet counsel given by an anonymous gentleman, in an old volume of the “Ladies’ Magazine” that lies before me,—­“She ought to present herself as a being made to please, to love, and to seek support; a being inferior to man, and near to angels.”

IX

OBJECTIONS TO SUFFRAGE

“When you were weak and I was strong, I toiled for you.  Now you are strong and I am weak.  Because of my work for you, I ask your aid.  I ask the ballot for myself and my sex.  As I stood by you, I pray you stand by me and mine.”—­CLARA BARTON.

    [Appeal to the returned soldiers of the United States, written from
    Geneva, Switzerland, by Clara Barton, invalidated by long service in
    the hospitals and on the field daring the civil war.]

THE FACT OF SEX

It is constantly said that the advocates of woman suffrage ignore the fact of sex.  On the contrary, they seem to me to be the only people who do not ignore it.