such a man is magnetic, meaning that he can poll a great many votes; or that such a woman thrilled her audience, meaning probably that they were in an electric condition to be shocked by her.  Now this is what we want to find out—­to know if persons are really magnetic or sympathetic, and how to tell whether a person is positive or negative.  In politics we are quite at sea.  What is the good of sending a man to Washington at the rate of a hundred miles an hour if we are uncertain of his electric state?  The ideal House of Representatives ought to be pretty nearly balanced—­half positive, half negative.  Some Congresses seem to be made up pretty much of negatives.  The time for the electrician to test the candidate is before he is put in nomination, not dump him into Congress as we do now, utterly ignorant of whether his currents run from his heels to his head or from his head to his heels, uncertain, indeed, as to whether he has magnetism to run in at all.  Nothing could be more unscientific than the process and the result.

In social life it is infinitely worse.  You, an electric unmarried man, enter a room full of attractive women.  How are you to know who is positive and who is negative, or who is a maiden lady in equilibrium, if it be true, as scientists affirm, that the genus old maid is one in whom the positive currents neutralize the negative currents?  Your affinity is perhaps the plainest woman in the room.  But beauty is a juggling sprite, entirely uncontrolled by electricity, and you are quite likely to make a mistake.  It is absurd the way we blunder on in a scientific age.  We touch a button, and are married.  The judge touches another button, and we are divorced.  If when we touched the first button it revealed us both negatives, we should start back in horror, for it is only before engagement that two negatives make an affirmative.  That is the reason that some clergymen refuse to marry a divorced woman; they see that she has made one electric mistake, and fear she will make another.  It is all very well for the officiating clergyman to ask the two intending to commit matrimony if they have a license from the town clerk, if they are of age or have the consent of parents, and have a million; but the vital point is omitted.  Are they electric affinities?  It should be the duty of the town-clerk, by a battery, or by some means to be discovered by electricians, to find out the galvanic habit of the parties, their prevailing electric condition.  Temporarily they may seem to be in harmony, and may deceive themselves into the belief that they are at opposite poles equidistant from the equator, and certain to meet on that imaginary line in matrimonial bliss.  Dreadful will be the awakening to an insipid life, if they find they both have the same sort of currents.  It is said that women change their minds and their dispositions, that men are fickle, and that both give way after marriage to natural inclinations that were suppressed while they