to a scotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently
corrupt politics. For one thing, I believe that they will initiate
measures against democracy--the worst evil of the present-day
world. When they come to the matter, they will certainly not ordain
the extension of the suffrage to children, criminals and the insane in
brief, to those ever more inflammable and knavish than the male
hinds who have enjoyed it for so long; they will try to bring about its
restriction, bit by bit, to the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic
and self-possessed--say six women to one man. Thus, out of their
greater instinct for reality, they will make democracy safe for a
democracy.


The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his
stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever
embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all hat have
gone before. But where is the delusion that women cherish--I mean
habitually, firmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of
propositions, held and maintained by them in sober earnest, that are
obviously not true? (I allude here, of course, to genuine women, not
to suffragettes and other such pseudo-males). As for me, I should
not like to undertake such a list. I know of nothing, in fact,
that properly belongs to it. Women, as a class, believe in none of
the ludicrous rights, duties and pious obligations that men are
forever gabbling about. Their superior intelligence is in no way
more eloquently demonstrated than by their ironical view of all such
phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude toward men is one of aloof
disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what men believe in, and
get into sweats about, and bellow for, is substantially the same, It
takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some new fallacy