It is a strange thing--though not inexplicable--that your ambitious woman is far more ruthless, far more unscrupulous, far more determined to win at any cost, than is the most ambitious of men. Again comes the law of extreme to show cause that this should be; but the fact is so sure that cause is of less interest. Not Machiavelli was so false, not Caligula was so cruel, not Caesar was so careless of right, as the woman whose political ambition has taken form and strength. That which bars her path must be swept aside, be it man or notion or principle. She sees but the one object, her goal, looming large before her; and she moves on with her eyes fixed, crushing beneath her feet all that would turn her steps. I have spoken of the cruelty of an ambitious woman; and it is worth while to pause a moment to consider this trait as displayed in women--not as a means, but as an end. There have been men who loved cruelty for its own sake; but they are few, and their methods crude, compared with the woman who have felt this strange passion. In the days of human sacrifices, it was the women who most thronged to the spectacles, who most eagerly fastened their eyes upon the expiring victims. In the gladiatorial combats, it was the women who greeted each mortal thrust with applause, and whose reversed thumbs won the majority for the signal of death to the vanquished. In the days of terror in France, it was the woman who led the mob that threatened the king and queen, and hanged Foulard to a lamp post after almost tearing him to pieces; it was the women who sat in rows around the guillotine, day after day, and placidly knit their terrible records of death; it was the women who cried for more victims, even after the legal murderers of the tribunals grew weary of their hideous task of condemnation. Not only thus--not only under the influence of excitement and passion--but in cold blood, there are instances among women of such ghastly cruelty that men recoil from the contemplation of such deeds. There is record of a Slavonic countess whose favorite amusement was to sit in the garden of her country palace, in the rigors of a Russian winter, while young girls were stripped by her attendants and water poured slowly over their bodies, thus giving them a death of enduring agony and providing the countess with new, though unsubstantial, statues for her grounds. This not more than two centuries ago, and in the atmosphere of so-termed Christianity. The annals of the Spanish Inquisition would be ransacked in vain for such ingenuity of torture; and though the Inquisitors may have grown to love cruelty for its own sake, they at least alleged reason for their deeds; the Russian countess frankly sought amusement alone.