These are substantial concessions to our sex, and they are prime essentials to personal comfort. For my part, I am content with them, asking no other I have never slept uneasily because the law did not permit me to vote or to become a candidate for office. The time was, as I have heard, when women voted, all who were eighteen years old being entitled to deposit their ballots. They mingled in the crowds about the polls, and became as violently agitated by partisan excitements as the men. Those who would have been quiet home bodies, had no such foolish liberty been allowed them, became zealous politicians; while others, to whom excitement of some kind was a necessity of life, turned to this, and became so wild with political furor as to unsex themselves,--if throwing aside all modesty be doing so. They carried placards in their hands among the crowd to influence voters, distributed handbills and tickets, entered into familiar conversation with total strangers, many of them persons of infamous character, and pleaded and wrangled with them to secure their votes. They obeyed literally the injunction of modern political managers to "vote early,"--so many mere girls swearing that they were of legal age, when they were in reality much younger, that the singular statistical dislocation became apparent, that there were no women in the country under eighteen years old. With so loose a morality on this point, it cannot be doubted that the other injunction, to "vote often," was as generally obeyed. I have no positive information as to how the married women who thus devoted themselves to electioneering managed their domestic concerns,--who prepared the dinner, who rocked the cradle, who tended the baby,--or whether these cards were thrust upon the husbands. History is silent on this subject; but the more practical minds of the men of this generation can readily conceive how inconvenient it would be for them to be transformed into cooks and dry-nurses. I have had no ambition to parade in Bloomer costume, or to be otherwise eccentric, even where it happened to be more comfortable. Neither have I figured as the chairman or secretary of a woman's convention, nor had my name ringing through the newspapers as an impatient struggler after more rights than I now possess. I do not think that I should be happier by being permitted to vote, and am sure there is no office I can think of that I would have for the asking. But I was never one of the strong-minded of my sex. I know that there are such, and that even in this noisy world they have made themselves heard. How attentively they have been listened to I will not stop to inquire. I have always believed that the truest self-respect lies, not in the exaction of questionable prerogatives, but in seeking to attain that shining eminence to which the common sentiment of our fellow-beings will concede honor and admiration as its rightful due.