Cast down your scales, O, Justitia, let them shiver to atoms on its marble floor for hanging in equal balance above the keys of the Treasury of the United States. They are a mocking lie. Beneath these desecrated symbols sits the Secretary of the Treasury, and to him a few shrinking, yet daring, women have appealed. “Four hundred dollars a year is enough for any woman to be paid for her work,” replies this accidental potentate, borne from obscurity to power solely by the “boosting” of a friend, who lifted him from his unthought-of “bench” in Massachusetts, with no guarantee of fitness from his past, to the chiefship of the Treasury of the Nation. “Four hundred dollars is enough for any woman to receive for her work, and more than she could earn anywhere else,” replies this man. This one remark, pitted against the facts recorded in this chapter, proved the man who made it as too narrow-minded and unjust, too pervaded with the caste and selfishness of sex, to be fit to hold the appointing power over hundreds of women, in culture and intellectually more than his peers. No man whose spring of action is “might is right” has a right to rule. To-day nothing could be more humiliating to a high-spirited, intelligent, honorable woman, than to sit in the gallery of the Hall of Representatives and be compelled to listen to a debate on woman’s work and wages going on below. Yet if she never heard the words uttered by men who claim to be the representatives of the people, and who make the laws which define her rights and decide her rewards, she could never realize how selfish, ungenerous, and unjust is the average man who assumes to represent woman, and to legislate for her welfare. These men, on the average, are fairly good husbands and indulgent fathers. They are anything but tyrants, personally, to the women of their families. But their personal relations do not prevent them from placing a very low estimate upon the powers, performance, place and prospects of women in general. Their caste of sex infiltrates through every word they utter. The man who is “bound to keep woman in her place,” before he makes a speech to that effect, rushes into the Congressional Library, and asks Mr. Spofford to give him every book which will help him to prove that woman is a weak and inefficient creature. He then proceeds to “cram” himself with a crude mass of statements, which he extracts pell-mell out of a heap of books. This unassimilated and impracticable load he delivers, a few days later, to Congress, to the galleries, and to the _Globe_—to prove that—no matter what her qualities or qualifications, moral or mental—being a woman, for that fact alone, she must not be a clerk, but an “_employé_;” and no matter what she has done or is capable of doing in the service of the Government, for that service she must receive but nine hundred dollars, and the sum be fixed by law.