Then the baroness continued. She said she was not a woman-suffragist--at least she wasn't sure that she was. She had, she thanked her stars, her own opinion upon most matters, but while she had no positive objection to right-minded women having any real or fancied wrongs redressed, and in their own way, she had not yet thought clearly enough upon the subject to be sure that the ballot was the remedy. She knew there was a great deal of nonsense talked about the moral influence women would exert in politics: perhaps they would, but to her it seemed very much like watering potato-blossoms to get rid of the worms at the root. Here the county clerk half rose, but the head-teacher held him with his disciplining eye, and he sat down again. What was needed, said the baroness, was not mending, regenerating, giving freedom or doing justice. These things were all very good, but more was necessary. "There is no remedy," she said with rising inflections and with emphasis--"no remedy but a total change. What we want is not an extension of the suffrage, but a _limitation_!" She wished it, however, distinctly understood that she in no way meant to affirm that woman was man's superior: she did not think so. In his own place man could not be surpassed. The sciences, the arts, the industrial pursuits, religion, civilization, all owed a deep debt to man, and it could not be ignored. She was the last person in the world to wish to ignore it. Properly governed, disciplined and educated, his development might outrun hope, defy prophecy. Out of his place he was a comet without an orbit. Drawn hither and thither by sinister stars, he was an eccentricity beyond calculation and full of harm. For this reason the interests of humanity demanded that the place of man in the conduct of affairs should be well defined and limited. It was well to look this matter in the face. "Now," proceeded the baroness, "I leave it to any class of men, to any one man, to declare whether the world is, or ever has been, well governed. Is there any age, any country upon record, where justice has reigned, where the interests of every class have been consulted, and where the people have lived together in mutual esteem, in unity and in prosperity? If we look through the world to-day, we find but one country that is governed in anything like a satisfactory manner. It is loved by some classes of its people, and admired by very many foreigners. When we reflect that it is governed by a queen, and that history tells us that its most prosperous period in the past was under Queen Elizabeth, it is certainly safe to assume--No, no, my friends," she said, hastily, "do not applaud. That is not my point. It is possible that women may govern better than men, but that is yet to be tested. This illustration proves but one thing--_that a country is better for not being governed by a man_."