This wide-awake Era Club has now a petition before the trustees of Tulane University praying that this progressive institution will no longer refuse to open its Medical School to women. It also memorialized its last legislature for the right to be accorded to women to witness a legal document; for, incredible as it may seem, there still remains among Louisiana statutes, as a survival of the French habit of thought, toward females, the disability of a woman to sign a paper as a witness.
Soon after the New Orleans Exposition, Miss Susan B. Anthony wrote me, while I was president of the Louisiana Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: “I long to see the grand hosts of the Temperance women of this nation standing as a unit demanding the one and only weapon that can smite to the heart the liquor-traffic. The Kansas women’s first vote has sent worse terror to the soul of the whisky alliance of the nation than it ever knew before.” The temperance hosts through bitter defeats long ago learned that they cannot carry their cause without the ballot, and “as a unit” they may be said to desire it and to work for it. They know Miss Anthony spoke words of soberness and experience. The first day there was a great debate, in the Constitutional Convention of our neighbor State, on methods of suffrage, about the middle of the day some one met a pale, haggard prince of liquor dealers rushing excitedly from the gates of the Capital. “My God!” he exclaimed, “if they let the women in our business is dead! We must do something!”—and he hurried to convene his partners in iniquity. What they did is not proclaimed; but immediately nearly every newspaper in the State began to pour in gatling-gun volleys against enfranchising women.
About the time Miss Anthony wrote me respecting Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton coming to lecture. “I do not want her,” she said, “to be translated before all of your splendid New Orleans women have seen and heard her.” And so I feel about Miss Anthony, I do not want her “to be translated” until she has seen the Louisiana woman vote as unrestrictedly as the Louisiana man.
But I should like to ask this question of those men and women—and there are many such—who are convinced of the righteousness of the women’s ballot, but who do not come forward and strengthen the struggling vanguard of a great movement,—
“Why is it that you choose to blow
Your bugle in the rear?
The helper is the man divine
Who tells us something new;—
The man who tells us something new
And points the road ahead;
Whose tent is with the forward few—
And not among the dead.
You spy not what the future holds,
A-bugling in the rear.
You’re harking back to times outworn,
A-bugling in the rear.”
CHAPTER XX.
“THE BEST IS YET TO BE.”
Why should women regret the golden period of youth? There are things finer and more precious than inexperience and a fair face. When a friend of Petrarch bemoaned the age revealed in his white temples, he replied: “Nay, be sorry rather that ever I was young, to be a fool.” Joyous and lovely as youth is—and it always seems a pity to be old in the springtime when everything else is young—how many of us would be willing to be again in the bonds of crudities, the embarrassments, the unreasoning agonies, and to the false values youth ever sets upon life? Youth longs for and cries out after happiness; it would wrest it from the world as its divine birthright; it does not understand itself or anybody else; and the pity of it all is that youth is gone before it has grasped the fact that its chief concern is not to be loved but to be lovely.