as it takes to convert a body of men, and even then they halt,
hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Colorado
had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to prohibition
sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt it; their own
majority voice was against it to the end. During the interval the men
voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking
to the mourners' bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the
women rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition
was adopted during the war without their votes--they did not get the
franchise throughout the country until it was in the
Constitution--and it is without their support today. The American
man, despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much
afraid of the police, and in all the regions where prohibition is now
actually enforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance
of it by arguing that it will do him good in the long run, or that he
ought to sacrifice his private desires to the common weal. But it is
almost impossible to find an American woman of any culture who is
in favour of it. One and all, they are opposed to the turmoil and
corruption that it involves, and resentful'of the invasion of liberty
underlying it. Being realists, they have no belief in any program
which proposes to cure the natural swinishness of men by
legislation. Every normal woman believes, and quite accurately, that
the average man is very much like her husband, John, and she
knows very well that John is a weak, silly and knavish fellow, and
that any effort to convert him into an archangel overnight is bound
to come to grief. As for her view of the average creature of her
own sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and so
destructive that a clear statement of it would shock beyond
endurance.