Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1914 — LOOKING DOWNWARD [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LOOKING DOWNWARD

THE RULING PASSION STRONG IN SUFFRAGISM. ,"•' Captain MacMonus, master alligator, retired, glanced carelessly at the universal sun clock and calendar embedded In the glass root ot the dia- . patcher’s room of the F. C. &A. Aerial * line’s New York float. Tbe instrument indicated that it was five minutes to midnight of August 1, 1962. "Hum," said the captain. “Time for | the Western Woman’s special to be signaling for cliproom. What’s she carrying tonight, Timothy?” “Wait until you see!" said the dispatcher. “Captain Nellie Sky certainly is bringing home the rarp passenger list tonight. Ha! There’B her ray working now. What! What’s that? She’s using her wireless phone for a long message. Something wrong, I guess.” The dispatcher sprang to the glass cabinet, where the leaping signal rays had spelled out the news of the coming of the Western Woman’&_special, X and thrust his head into the rubber--■protected glass receiving hood. Two minutes later he stepped out' and shook his head. "Those western girls certainly do cut up when they come east on a junket,” he said. “Rafferty,” he said to an assistant, “notify our woman chief of police to have, two officers here to meet the Woman’s special. \Two passengers are under arrest, and further disorder threatening." “Great Scott!” said MacManus. “What’s been happening on board the special?” “Oh, the same old stuff. Always disorder on these woman junkets. Row in the tearoom, as usual. Captain Nellie phones me that she’s got two of them locked In their cabins and predicts a row when they land bn the float. Here she comes now." Out of the darkness of midnight a

flood of light broke upon the float and turned night Into day. Instantly a clip op the port side opened its great iron arms, and a second later, out of nowhere, the Western Woman’s special, whose dpinty pink hull had traveled from San Francisco to New York In 40 hours, came fluttering down with something bird-like in its movements, and settled into its berth with a gentle exhaust of ballast-gas that sounded like a contented, lady-like sigh. An electrical current blazed slightly as it broke out the hermetic seals, a curved glass door slid open in the pilot-turret, and out stepped a masterly woman, whose square Jaw and air of command, without the assistance of her delicately embroidered pink uniform, wopld have sufficed,to mark her for the vessel’s captain. “Short circuit my signal rays!” she exploded, saluting her senior, £aptain MacManus. “I certainly have had a trip that' is almost enough to make a fellow wish that she was back in the old days, when she could have stayed quietly at home and let some man do this kind of work. Almost, but not quite. If there ever was a list of passengers calculated to make a single woman want to give up her right to vote by refusing to work, this is the one. Whyj the tearoom hasn’t been quiet a minute since we left the Mississippi. It’s been an orgy for'fair.” “Who are the fair ladies who hacre been so—er—so lively?” asked Captain MacManus. “Delegates to the Woman’s Repub-

lican convention,” replied Captain Nellie. > “Everything from ex-governors to ward workers. It was to be expected that they would be quarreling before the ship was in the clips. It’s that kind of a crowd.” “And what might the cause of the row be?” asked MacManus. “The most serious thing in the world,” said Miss Sky, “One delegate said that another delegate was old enough to have been one of the old-time suffragettes. Here! What are you laughing at, Captain MacManus?” “I was thinking,” chuckled the old man; “I was Just thinking what a funny world this persists in being iq spite of the efforts of science to the contrary. You women never will be anything but women. Now, look at me; when anybody says to me, ‘Captain Macßfanus, you’re old enough to remember the days of the suffragettes,* I’m proud to say: ‘Right you are.’ But when one of you says the same to there’s a battle in the tearoom and you have to put somebody under arrest. Now, why is that, Captain Nellie; can you tell me?” Captain Sky sniffed. - “Such conversation is too old fashioned to resent, Captain MacManus.” she said. “But for your benefit I will explain that the thoroughly modern woman does not get angry when reminded of her age. On the contrary she considers it a compliment. There are a few women left, however, who persist in allowing the old influence and prejudices of sex influence them. It happened to be one of these that started the trouble aboard the special. As for us —the modern women —you’re ridiculous, Captain MacManus.” “Then you admit, Captain Nellie, that you yourself are old enough to remember the days of the suffragettes?” asked MacManus. "What! Sir, how dare you!” cried

Miss Sky. I’ll have you know, sir, that I—” "Ho! Ho! That you are not over thirty-five, eh? I know, captain; I was Just trying you out” —"You're a horrid old wretch!” said the indignant offioeress. “I think you’re real mean.” “Those are harsh words, Captain Nellie.” “I want them to be harsh.” “Then you are Indignant because I Insinuated—” "No, I’m not; not a bit of it” “Then why did you want your words to be harsh?” Captain Sky tossed her head. “Because,” she said, “That’s why—because.” “The same old reason,” murmured old MacManus, “the same reason they used to give before they could vote.” “Can you really remember those days?” asked the determined airigatorine. “No; I’m not curious, not a bit of it; but—can you really?” “I can. It was in the days of my youth that the plate-glass war, as the struggle in which women won the right to vote has, since became known, was being fought I , saw those stirring days.” Captain Sky clasped her hands and beamed. “How perfectly thrilling, Captain MacManus!” she cried. “Do tell me about it, please. Oh, to have been one of those early heroes! What a glorious existence was theirs. Npdr—now there’s nothing left tor

women to find fault with; they have their, own way in everything. Such a monotonous age aB we live in. But, tell me, captain, why did they call it the plate-glaas war?” Captain MacManus glanced mischievously out of the corners of his eye at the Western Woman’s special waiting in her clip for the captain’s signal to open the glass hatches. At the liner’s windows women might be seen clamoring to be allowed to land. Captain Nellie Sky heeded not.. "Well,” said MacManus, “it was in this way: Women were the most grasping beings that you could imagine in those days. They had acquired all the world but the ballot. They ran the whole world. Stores / were run wholly for their trade; plays were manufactured with the single eye to pleasing their tastes; books were written and illustrated for theft- entertainment; and so on down the whole list of everything—except the ballot. That was man’s last 1 stronghold. He controlled that, and through that kept himself deceived into believing that he ran the world. He hung onto it for dear life; the ballot and his pants were the things he would not give up. “But the women had set their minds on having it. First they mader speeches demanding it. Then they wrote books demindingf it. After that there were parades. ‘No,’ said the men. 'You’re not fit to vote.’ Then the window breaking began. ‘Why do you do it?’ asked the men. ‘Because,’ says the women. ‘Because why?’ said the men. ‘Just because,' sai'd the women and heaved some more stones, to show how fit they were. Then the men got scared and put the throwers in jail. ‘Ah!’ says the women, ‘we’ve got them at last. They can’t stand to have their plate glass fronts smashed in. Sisters, arm and break some windows.' “Pretty soon it got so that all the women were breaking windows. ‘Good morning,’ says one to the other, ‘hSff you smashed any store fronts?* ‘Not yet,’ says the other. ‘They’re all broken up my way; I’m waiting for new ones to be put in.’ “No man’s window was safe in those days. They smashed the glazed door of Morgan’s private office, . Gentlemen sitting down for a quiet little game in their Fifth avenue clubs had a brick come flying in through their sacred windows. Nothing’was sacred. The world was threatened wjth glassless windows. It would have meant the world’s end. The world was all business then, and most business was done on a front, and you can’t have a front without glass, and there you are. “•Will you be nice and stop breaking glass if we let you vote?’ says the men. “ ‘We’ll stop breaking windows/ said the women. ‘That’s all we’ll promise.’ ‘“You’re always nice, except for that,’ said the men, not being such fools as the historians of these days would make out. ‘“Well, if you say so, of course—/ says the women; and then the men let them have their_ votes, and the plate glass war came to a happy end. “And afterwards the men found how they had been double-crossed. Scientists began to investigate why the women had taken to breaking glass, instead of something else. Their discoveries showed the sublety of womankind compared to the simple mind of man. The more broken glass there was the cheaper became those little hand-mirrors that women can’t get along without even today, so the dear ladies were really killing two birds with the same stones.” “Huh!” sniffed Captain Nellie. *T don’t believe that at all. Women neveif were such slaves to the mirror as all that.” “No?” said Captain MacManus. "By the way, Captain Nellie/ how did that dab of machine oil come on your nose, and what makes your hair hang down so funny?” Captain Nellie dashed to a mirror that hung on the float. “And by the way, Captain Nellie,” persisted the old man, “your passengers have been waiting to disembark for fifteen minutes.” “Well, they’ll have to wait some more,” muttered Captain Nellie, dabbing with a powder rag. “I simply look a perfect fright.” (Copyright by W. G. Chanman.> *

“Because,” she said, “that’s why—because.”