American elixir, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are
ostensibly remedies for specifically feminine ills, anatomically
impossible in the male, are chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent
druggist tells me, by men.


My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is
that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none
the less real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the
end, in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an
intelligent grappling with some of the capital problems of the
commonwealth is almost impossible. A politician normally prospers
under democracy, not in proportion as his principles are sound and
his honour incorruptible, but in proportion a she excels in the
manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary
perils and imaginary defences against them. Our politics thus
degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins; the male voter, a
coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at a new one and
electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred years past the
people of the United States, the most terrible existing democratic
state, have scarcely had apolitical campaign that was not based upon
some preposterous fear--first of slavery and then of the manumitted
slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of the old and
then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they are not
easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily into such
facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to snuffling
and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would cause
a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy
and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this
sniffing. What we need--and in the end it must come--is a sniff so