I believe in sanity and justice, and I believe in honor and integrity of women - my experience has been that they're of far more dependable and less hysterical quality than men - and these United States sadly need such things in their bodies politic.

Most men are by nature grafters and parasites. Some ,women are, not by nature but by training and influence of environment, grafters and parasites. But most women, when they do turn themselves inside out in the sight of the world, reveal an independence of viewpoint, and a freedom and a bravery of soul that cannot possibly be bought for money.

What I most admire about the suffragists of forty years ago and now, is their willingness to suffer for their cause. It is a rare trait in this, the day of the fourflusher. If the cause of woman suffrage had not in itself one merit, or one tottering leg to stand on, or was the tenet of fools, it still would be a fine thing and a poetic thing for the heroic sincerity that gave it birth, and that keeps it living, and that finally will triumph.

To show my belief in such women as Susan Anthony, a hero and a martyr if ever there was one, I enthusiastically and gladly would go in sackcloth. Woman suffrage never before had, and belike never will have again, another such woman for a leader. It's alas! at this restless and crucial near-crisis of it, that she is deep in her quiet grave. Still, her soul, like John Brown's, goes marching on. It stands for strength, nobility and truth.

These things by themselves hold their own and inevitably win out-and to a person like me, whose life is made up of the picturesque romanticnesses, the fascinating treacheries, the exquisitely cruel slips 'twixt the cup and the lip, the iridescent trivialities - to such as me they have their own deep compelling and enthralling charm.

I believe the most fascinating quality of the human mind and the rarest, when all's said, is sincerity - and next after that enthusiasm, that thing of fire and passion which, when given leeway, bide the sleeping soul awake in its dankest clay that breathes.

It's by those two things that the suffragists of forty years ago blazed the trail for those of the present day. Susan Anthony, gently bred and frail of body, went undaunted, sans fear and sans reproach, to a villainous county jail to live for months, amid a mixed company of prostitutes and drug-tainted women, rather than pay the fine, or let her friends pay it, which was the alternative penalty for her "improper use of the ballot": the casting of her vote for president.

The speeches of Mrs Stanton on the floor of the Senate, as literature, as the expression of a high wrought, deep fired mind, and as logical argument for her cause, were recorded among the big things that were heard there, and are so recorded yet. That not-too-sane, but entirely picturesque and delightful woman, Victoria Woodhull, and her almost as picturesque sister, Tennessee Claflin, in the heyday of their youth, of their insolent beauty and good looks, and of their brilliant mentalities, turned their young energies into the channel of the suffrage movement with all the arclor of their hearts, and tent to a somber and half-lost cause a parti-colored impetus.

If woman suffrage is not likely ever to have another advo- cate so strong, so loyal and so noble-minded as Susan Anthony, it is equally unlikely to have one so picturesque, so valiant, so absolutely "game" as the handsome young Woodhull woman of the veiled star eyes and the goddess brow. She followed up all her enthusiasms with a headstrong belief in their rightness and justness, and a scornful regardlessness of the cost to herself, which would make in a day twenty thousand friends for the cause and twenty thousand foes for her. She made countless mistakes, but the honor of her intent redeemed them all.

The eloquence of Elizabeth Stanton and Julia Howe, and the example of Susan Anthony and Lucy Stone, meant the enrollment in the ranks of all women whom they reached. But only Victoria Woodhull - though, too, well worshipped by women-ever succeeded, on her lecture platform and of it, in hammering the cold iron of masculine indifference into malleable conversion. She brought every gift and talent and advantage she owned into the woman suffrage game - she knew its need. Her life, set as it was in New York (then as now a city of treacherous delights), might have been one of beflowered gaiety. But she cast her lot with the reformers of her day and found in it, as she made it for others, a toil and a task more enthralling, by reason at once of its humanness and its truth, than even the world - old pursuit of the flying pleasure. She likewise went to jail in punishment for some of her zeal.

All those are of a bygone era, but the history of their efforts is the most informing and convincing that the cause has yet shown. There is a splendid desolation about them in their battle for what they knew was, and would be while they lived, a hopeless cause.

Having got all of that out of my system, as they say on the "vocleville" stage, I feel free to put forth my own private and erratic brand of views anent the subject. Much and sincerely as I admire and feel inspired by the Woodhulls, and the Ida Harpers, and the Carrie Chapman Catts, and the Mrs Pankhursts, and the militant suffragettes in England, as a heroic cult, and much as I'm interested in the cause itself, I - M. MacLane - personally would be an extremely unfit person to hold a ballot.

And I am so well aware of the fact that I never would bother to vote, though all my sisters-in-arms were going, loaded and primed, to the polls. I am governed only by my impulses and affections and led on by the fascinations with which life for me is always rife. And I should cast a vote on the same picturesque principles, if I cast one at all, with no regard for such tiresome things as safe, sane conservatism.

No, when it comes to voting for president, I shouldn't be there - I should find more interest in sitting at home and mending me a pair of blue silk stockings, the while going over in my mind the affairs of the heart I might then be engaged in. I don't much believe in presidents, anyway. They don't seem to change anything, benefit anything, or "start" anything. Patent medicines with wood alcohol in them are still being sold to the public, and children are still working in the mills and mines. Trusts and combines are yet solid with themselves and the hookworm remains rampant and triumphant. So, what's the use?

We need more patriotism and fewer presidents. Until we get it, which, certes, will be quite some time, I, for one, am not going to be much interested in the politics of this domain. I am a deal keener for prizefighting - I am strong for the virile heroes of the ring.

But I am still stronger for the qualities of sincerity and enthusiasm - which brings me back to the suffragists and my deep belief in them. The wide, long, ancient curse upon women includes limitless waiting and limitless durance and an infinite hoping against hope. They will win out, beyond a doubter's shadow, in a dozen or fourteen years, or less.

And when women do get the franchise, their work and their battling will have just begin.

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