A few more questions—addressed more particularly to veteran observers than to those to whom the world is new and strange. Do you think that when all women are armed with the ballot they will compel a return to the old _régime_ of reverence and delicate consideration—extorting by their power the tribute once voluntarily paid to their weakness? Is there any known way by which women can at the same time be our political equals and our social superiors, our competitors in the sharp and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread, and the objects of our unselfish and undiminished devotion? The present predicts the future; of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitive female hearts feel the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory, some women enjoy under this _régime_ of partial “emancipation” all women pay. Of the coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters of the sex have not a groat and can bear the situation with tranquillity. They have either passed the age of masculine attention or were born without the means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can afford to defy eviction. While men did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world, setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with true sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves, a very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity which was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better, generally, than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but their goodness was supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and more or less independent of environmental influences. We are changing all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing and public speaking, and they are sure to disclose, even to the unthinking, certain defects of character in themselves which their silence had veiled. Their competition, too, in the several kinds of affairs will slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them to temptations that will distinctly lower the morality of their sex. All these changes, and many more having a similar effect and significance, are occurring with rapidity, and the stated results are already visible to even the blindest observation. In accurate forecast of the new order of things conjecture fails, but so much we know: the woman-superstition has already received its death wound and must soon expire.