goal-birds are merely finding a new reason for their old antagonism. The wolf in Æsop had always a pretext for eating the lamb. The only reasonable thing to do on this argument would be to refuse the vote to those noisy, unwomanly females who went to gaol, and give it to all the women who didn't, and I am sure there is not one of the prisoners who would not be content on these terms to have secured the vote for her sisters and for all future generations of her suffering sex.
If, however, the womanliness which these females have failed in has been displayed by the ladies of the Women's Anti-Suffrage movement, then the sooner such womanliness is emancipated away the better for all of us. The worst that you can say about our police-pummelers, after all, is that they are too manly. But these "Anti-Suffragettes," alas! are not manly enough. Their action is redolent of all that sneaking mutual hatred of woman by woman which was unhappily engendered by woman's old over-dependence upon man. These women are guilty of treason to their sex. They are trying to set back the current of Evolution. It is ridiculous to suppose that what woman once was she must always remain. Eve might as well have remained a rib. Did Evolution say its last word when woman came out of the harem, when she dropped the Oriental head-veil from her face, and looked eye to eye upon life? Who knows what further heights she has to scale? Why do we always hear of Man and Superman, and never of Woman and Superwoman?
If you want to see the weakness of the "Anti-Suffragettes" you have only to imagine one of them going to prison for her ideal. The thing cannot be imagined; she has no ideal, no living fire flowing in her veins, nothing but a barren negative, nothing but a sluggish satisfaction in old superstitions. That is the saddest feature of a state of slavery: the slaves actually come to prefer
