It may excite wonder among my male readers that Alice should have told Lucy things that she knew the latter had seen with her own eyes. But this would be hardly putting the case fairly, as her remarks were couched rather in the form of exclamatory comments than of pure narrative. The male reader, again (would that there were no such dull animals in the world!), must be warned not to suppose that Alice and Mary were rude in talking simultaneously. It is discourteous, oh, crass mortal, for one man to interrupt another; but where a party of girls are met together, it will be found that the words of each, though many, are no impediment, but a stimulus, rather, to those of the rest.
Like swallows at eventide, circling around some village chimney, the more of them in the air at once, the more merrily do they flit.
And it will be found, too, that no matter how many have been talking at once, each will have heard what all have said.
It is when I contemplate this well-known phenomenon that my wonder daily grows that no allusion has ever been made to this acknowledged superiority of the female over the male homo, by what are called the woman-women, in their annual pow-wows in the interest of their sex. Cropped-haired woman after cropped-haired woman will arise, reinforced, here and there, by some mild-eyed male, o’er whose sloping shoulders soft ringlets cluster, and the burden of the plaint of she-he and he-she, alike, will be only that woman is unjustly excluded by man from this employment or that privilege, for which she is as well fitted as he. They seem to me to forget that Hannibal was not overcome till Africa was invaded; and they will never advance their cause till they find some female Seipio to put man upon the defensive, and aggressively insist that the real question is not whether she is capable of becoming lawyer, physician, preacher, but whether he is, or, at any rate, will be, in the re-fashioned world which is coming, fit for any avocation whatever.
Let us take the legal profession for an example. Excluding the male lawyer of the period, as an interested witness, who can fail to see how much would be gained were our judges, our counsel, and our jurymen all women? As things actually stand, the law’s delay has passed into a proverb. But what delay could there be in a trial wherein all the witnesses could be examined simultaneously, without a word being lost on the jury; where the learned (and lovely) counsel could sum up side by side (like a pair of well-matched trotters), neither of them getting in the first word, neither (what fairness!) being allowed the last? Again. Instead of a drowsy Bench, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, you would have an alert Sofa, capable of lending one ear to the plaintiff’s counsel, one to the defendant’s; taking in, with one eye, every convolution of the jury’s back-hair (should such things be), while with the other, she—the Court—estimated the relative good looks of the litigants, preparatory to instructing the jury and laying down the law. And so of the other professions, did space allow.
But this is not the worst of the matter. Already have advanced thinkers begun dimly to see that, with the approaching extinction of war, the time will come when courage will be worse than useless; while, in the rapid multiplication of labor-saving machinery, there is discernible the inevitable approach of an era when superior strength will be a disadvantage. For is not strength assimilated food? And in the Struggle for Existence will not She, requiring less food, and being therefore Fittest, survive? So that, with Seer’s eye, I seem to behold the day when my sex, excluded from every avocation, shall perish from off the face of that earth over which we have so long and so haughtily lorded.
The truth is, my dear lad (would that you were a girl!), I shudder when I think of your fate and that of your brother males, three hundred years from now. Preserved here and there in the zoological gardens of the wealthy and the curious, along with rare specimens of the bison of the prairie, skeletons of the American Indian and the dodo; exhibited in mammoth moral shows, and meeting the stare of the unnumbered female of the period with a once wicked, but now, alas! futile wink, you will rue the day when your ancestors, mistaking might for right, excluded woman from that haven of rest, the ballot-box. Why, it was but the other day that I saw a boy with a basketful of pups, which he was going to drown; and on my asking him why he condemned them to this fate, he answered, in the simplest way, “Oh, they are nothing but she’s.”
Yet we are never tired of boasting of our nineteenth century!
How the world is to be kept wagging when once the custom is established of drowning all the boy-babies (except specimens for menageries and preserves), is a problem for the science of the future. It suffices that I have recorded my views upon this burning question.
And upon this plank of my platform you, my grand-son-to-the-tenth-power, will, I trust, be allowed to float by the womankind of your day, in remembrance of my gallant defence of their rights in mine. Yes, yes, you will be one of the elect and undrowned!