The objection to seeing seven hundred men defeated by a coalition of three hundred men with eight hundred women, lies in the fact that the defeated minority knows that it has a free hand, and that nothing less than eight hundred men could prevent it from using its physical power, were it so inclined. Only a force and supremacy that was real, and not nominal, could make it to submit. The rhetorical trick of belittling the matter by speaking of it as "fisticuffs" will not pass in this discussion. When the South Carolina negroes on election day looked into the rifle-barrels of the Red-shirt clubs, it was no matter of fisticuffs. When every statesman in our country was eagerly seeking a peaceful solution of the Hayes-Tilden dispute, it was not fisticuffs that they feared. When the Dostie convention was broken up and its leaders murdered in New Orleans, it was not by means of fisticuffs. When the Chicago anarchists threw their bomb into the ranks of the policemen in Haymarket Square, they were not playing at fisticuffs. When the rail way strikers in Pittsburg stopped the trains, "killed" the locomotives, and burned the freight, there was no fisticuffs about it. And when a Southern minority refused to abide by the result of the election of 1860, and the Northern majority shouldered muskets and went down and compelled them to, not the most flippant writer would have thought of calling it fisticuffs. All these are simply readily recalled instances of the necessity for power in the enforcement of law. She goes on to say: "But is it only in such a hypothetical case that a minority would know it could, if allowed to resort to physical force, shiver to fragments the majority? The burly brakemen in railroad strikes would, probably, in a fair hand-to-hand encounter, be much bested over all the stockholders of the road,--weakened, not only because they included women in their midst, but also by sedentary habits and predominately indoor occupations. Why do they not try this way of settling their difficulties? Why do not the classes in England, who still remain entirely disfranchised, and with whom rests so much physical strength, drop their fists into the balance as Brennus did his sword, and cut short the futile, womanish discussion? The answer is ready in every one's mouth. It is not that it cannot be done, but that, on the whole, people are all agreed that it is best it should not be done. It is not that physical force is respected less, but that mental force is respected more."