Le Diable est aux Vaches.
If it be that ridicule is the test of truth, as
Shaftesbury is reported to have said and didn't, the
doctrine of Woman Suffrage is the truest of all
faiths. The amount of really good ridicule that
has been expended upon this thing is appalling, and
yet we are compelled to confess that to all appearance
“the cause” has been thereby shorn of no
material strength, nor bled of its vitality. And
shall it be admitted that this potent argument of
little minds is as powerless as the dullards of all
ages have steadfastly maintained? Forbid it,
Heaven! the gimlet is as proper a gimlet as any
in all Christendom, but the timber is too hard to
pierce! Grant ye that “the movement” is waxing
more wondrous with each springing sun, who shall
say what it might not have been but for the sharp
hatcheting of us wits among its boughs? If the
doctor have not cured his patient by to-morrow he
may at least claim that without the physic the man
would have died to-day.
And pray who shall search the vitals of a whale
with a bodkin—who may reach his jackknife
through the superposed bubber? Pachyderm, thy
name is Woman! All the king's horses and all
the king's men shall not bend the bow that can
despatch a clothyard shaft through thy pearly hide.
The male and female women who nightly howl
their social and political grievances into the
wide ear of the universe are as insensible to the
prickings of ridicule as they are unconscious of
logic. An intellectual Goliah of Gath might spear
them with an epigram like unto a weaver's beam,
and the sting thereof would be as but the nipping of
a red ant. Apollo might speed among them his
silver arrows, which erst heaped the Phrygian
shores with hecatombs of Argive slain, and they
would but complain of the mosquito's beak.
Your female reformer goes smashing through
society like a tipsy rhinoceros among the tulip
beds, and all the torrent of brickbats rained upon
her skin is shed, as globules of mercury might be
supposed to run off the back of a dry drake.
One of the rarest amusements in life is to go about
with an icicle suspended by a string, letting it down
the necks of the unwary. The sudden shrug, the
quick frightened shudder, the yelp of apprehension,
are sources of a pure, because diabolical, delight. But
these women—you may practise your chilling joke
upon one of them, and she will calmly wonder where
you got your ice, and will pen with deliberate fingers
an ungrammatical resolution denouncing congelation
as tyrannical and obsolete.
We despair of ever dispelling these creatures by
pungent pleasantries—of routing them by sharp
censure. They are, apparently, to go on practically
unmolested to the end. Meantime we are cast
down with a mighty proneness along the dust; our
shapely anatomy is clothed in a jaunty suit of
sackcloth liberally embellished with the frippery
of ashes; our days are vocal with wailing, our
nights melodious with snuffle!
Brethren, let us pray that the political sceptre
may not pass from us into the jewelled hands
which were intended by nature for the clouting of
babes and sucklings.
