much private dirty linen is destined to overhauled in the great political washing-day near at hand. With an ideal object and courage to work towards it, her arrival in literature, theatres, churches, schools or business brings reformation. As a bevy of girls were playing under my window, and one slip of womanhood put her saucy foot on a mutual right, the other scattered screaming "I'll tell mother, I'll tell mother." It seemed childish, but there was deep wisdom in the method of reconciliation, for "an ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy," and tons of statesmen. Natural equity, whose lawgiver is love, has foreordained that the same free and equal meeting of the sexes which inspires private order and ineffable enjoyment will insure public rectitude in political action.
Bread and the ballot.The recognition of woman's personality, though not regarded by any one as a cure for all evils, will be a renovating tendency, an entrance into new fields of ethics and experience yet unexplored. Statesmen and even ministers of religion now frankly confess that they dare not voice their deepest convictions in public, but have two sets of morals, one for the closet and one for the street. Government helps reform chiefly by getting out of its way, does right from "necessity," wrong from choice; deity seems about the most impotent being known, while the devil has full swing, and wins, except here and there, when he builds his badness "up so high it topples down to the other side" and makes a sort of goodness. Judged by the records of legislation thus far, men are made of the "queerest dregs chaos ever churned up" into sentient form. The fact that for centuries they have had representative rulers of some kind, proves that mere voting will not enact order. But the hand which denies women the ballot shuts the college and filches her earnings. Since a disfranchised class have less power of redress on account of that disability, the Labor Reform League puts her right to vote side by side with the claim of service to its reward. We thereby do not solve the labor question, but impanel a more impartial jury to try it. Not good will or votes regulate wages, but supply and demand, now generally overruled by the inequitable custom which allows one to take from another the largest possible value for the least possible return, provided he keeps out of jail. Since employers have preferred to speculate on their suffering necessities rather than concede their natural right to self-supporting independence, to equal pay for equal work with men, the few trades women have entered and mastered are so crowded that they must submit to the terms offered or surrender their places to more destitute applicants knocking at the door. We do not agree with the prevalent infidelity to right which affirms this dependence natural, and poverty of workers a "necessary evil," but summon a new judge into court—Equity. For seventy years one-eightieth part of the American people ruled our States with the iron rod of property in man; that form of political robbery is now broken, but, through subtler methods, slaveholders survive, and North and South get the earnings of labor more successfully than ever; working women, because physically the weakest, being their most deeply defrauded and helpless victims. Since one can justly take from another only what he renders an equivalent for in labor cost, the right to hold property he has not earned or received as the free bequest of others' service is purely imaginary. Interest on money, rent and profit, or dividends, are therefore inadmissible, except for work done or risk incurred; and speculative gain, in
