dry-goods clerk turned out of a retail store by a strapping little
female, who couldn't jump a counter worth shucks. I have seen him in his
misery industriously study "What I Know About Farming," squat on a farm
in the West, and bring himself, his wife, and four miserable offshoots
to the alms-house by endeavoring to apply the rules set down in "What I
Know About Farming" to 160 acres of land. I have seen the poor,
half-paid type-setters strike for their altars, their sires, and more
wages, and I have seen a troop of petticoats, with gal children inside
them, trot into the type-setter's place, so that the miserable
compositors were compelled to return and starve on four or five dollars
a day. That's petticoat government with a vengeance. Putting your nose
to the grindstone isn't nice at any time, but it's awful when the gal
children turn.

But that is only the beginning. They have struck for bigger things. In
the expressive language of the immortal JOHNNY MILTON, they are going
for the whole hog. They want to vote; some of them have been caught
repeating already; they want to sit on juries, and they want to go to
Congress. Heaven forbid that any of them should ever reach the House of
Representatives! Imagine the size of the _Congressional Globe_ if we
should send women there! Why, there would be as great a dearth of paper
in Washington as there is now in Paris. They want to shave you, dress
you, doctor you into your coffins, preach a funeral discourse over your
remains, and then take your will into the Surrogate's Court and fight
over the little property they have left you.

They say all this means that they are our equals, and intend to show it.
Listen. In a town some hundreds of miles distant there is a law firm
whose sign reads thus: