effort to relieve the pain. One who fixes the recompense and requital for forty years of toil and responsibility at the paltry sum of $2, has suffered only $2 worth during those forty years. This fact does not exonerate the husband from one iota of culpability. She submitted for forty years to a servile life, and for forty years he permitted it. The moral is contained in the fact that she herself established the ratio of 2 to 39,998.
For forty years as wife and mother she had worked early and late, doing her share of the farm-work rearing children, nursing them through illness, rising first in the morning and being the last to seek her bed at night; had washed and ironed and scrubbed and sewed and mended, and as a compensation for all this, she asked as her share of the fortune which her economy and industry had helped create, $2.
It is true her husband had given her shelter, food and clothing, all of the necessaries and some of the comforts of life. Yet of their accumulated surplus, $40,000, she was satisfied with $2.
This request to sign a paper was probably the first time it had dawned upon her mind that she as an individual was a rational being, endowed with the power of free will. This was probably her first hint that the law gave her liberty to express her prejudices and preferences. Her husband had never asked her opinion, nor sought her permission in any of his transactions, and her own opinions were too puerile and undetermined to seek expression.
It is useless to argue that she was afraid of her husband; "duty hath no place for fear," "fear always springs from ignorance." That she knew nothing of the value of money she certainly knew much of that which is the equivalent of purchase money, viz., labor. That she was ignorant of her rights, privileges and power-—it is just that knowledge which makes a distinction between man and the brute creation.
"The lamb, thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."
This woman should be neither blamed nor censured for her ignorance. It was her misfortune not her fault. Her mother before her had doubtless given the example of patient, silent servitude, and her environments were bounded by the same horizon. She knew no other world. There might have been concealed under the mark of stolid obedience, some sparks of rebellion or despair, but who sounds an alarm for a smouldering fire which shows neither smoke nor flame.
This incident is an extreme case, it is to be hoped without a duplicate, but it illustrates the type of servitude against which the new woman is inaugurating a revolt.
At the present time there is no occasion for revolt against legislation. Women can do and accomplish what they choose to do, and all for which they fit themselves. No laws are actually enforced which work any hardships to woman since property laws and those affecting domestic relations have been modified. The new woman asks no special or class legislation, nor has she occasion to revolt against industrial, educational or social conditions. Every avocation and profession is now open to her. She must submit to the same laws of competition. supply and demand as man. She must travel through the same cycles of evolution that he has traversed. She must specialize and sacrifice just as he has done, and in a few years discrimination in the labor market will be determined exclusively by ability and fitness. She now shares in schools and universities the advantages offered to man in the lines of advanced education. Man is eager to accord to her a deep and lasting respect for the faithful discharge of responsibilities. She asserts an authority which he does not dispute in the sphere called home. She is infinitely helpful, as an instructor by her enlarged education which he does not grudge, and when she raps at the door of professions and avocations, he does not withhold congratulations. Yet with all the advantages of legislation, education and avocation there is still something lacking.
There is in womankind, an inertia, a matter-of-course submission, born of established usages and unwritten laws for which the new woman seeks a counteracting force.
There are women, and not a few, who believe that universal suffrage will accomplish this purpose. That in the folds of the ballot is concealed a talisman having power to work transmutations, to impart life to indifference and inactivity.
Another portion, no less in numbers, fail to accredit such potency to the ballot. A mustard plaster even of as ample dimensions as an Australian ballot will not raise a loaf of bread, not even if applied at a ratio of 16 to 1. The admixture of a very small quantity of yeast, will in a few hours leaven the whole lump. No one believes the ballot will deter woman from rising, but many doubt the drastic power of outward applications, without an internal vitalizing impulse. To them there is something repugnant in soliciting credentials, asking rights, claiming suffrage and demanding admittance. They hope to accomplish the same end in a different way, by working from within, developing latent powers, building even on slender foundations a broad true culture, so that woman will be invited to positions of trust, and offered rights so long withheld. The new woman has
