powerful that it will call a halt upon the, navigation of the ship from
the forecastle, and put a competent staff on the bridge, and lay
a course that is describable in intelligible terms.


The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern
democracies before the extension of the suffrage were, usually
chosen, not for their competence but for their mere talent for idiocy;
they reflected accurately thymol weakness for whatever is rhetorical
and sentimental and feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what
happened in a salient case. Every four years the male voters of the
United States chose from among themselves one who was put
forward as the man most fit, of all resident men, to be the first
citizen of the commonwealth. He was chosen after interminable
discussion; his qualifications were thoroughly canvassed; very large
powers and dignities were put into his hands. Well, what did we
commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We found, not
a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of
notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that
they must needs disgust a sentient suckling--in brief, a spouting
geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported
assumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and
platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were
flattered when they were called comprehensible--specifically, a
Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.


This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of
comparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a
woman of like fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh