80 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



work to wliicli most educated men are bound only by a sense 

 of duty. It is not the highest style of manhood that is led 

 captive by politics ; and how a woman can become enamored 

 of it is "passing strange." 



Politics represents rather the friction of society than its con- 

 served energy. It is a low state of civilization where much 

 of social power is turned into its channels. When you hear a 

 great din in politics you are only listening to the creaking of 

 the wheels of state. When politics runs high, arts, industries, 

 sciences and education are apt to be running low. You can 

 see this illustrated in the difference between the south and 

 north divisions of our own union. The south for generations 

 has consumed its energies in politics. It has simply been 

 burnt up in its own excitement, and it has nothing to show for 

 it. The great unfilled vacancies of the south on a railroad 

 map, are testimonies to the desolation that results when soci- 

 ety makes politics a prime ambition. Viewed as an industry, 

 it is the most precarious of all methods of meeting the prob- 

 lem of subsistence. What chances it offers could scarcely be 

 open to mothers at all. 



Neither need unmarried women look in this quarter for any 

 hope of solution of their difficulties. One of the most pitiable 

 objects among men is the stranded politician. If a woman has 

 failed to secure a life companion, she need not give her heart 

 to politics. Politics can jilt as well as an individual. It is 

 proverbially fickle. Heaven forefend an unmarried woman 

 from adding to her man-forsaken plight the condition of a 

 bankrupt politician, forsaken of the gods. Politics is not an 

 industry. As an industry it has done nothing for man. It 

 can do nothing for woman. At any rate it has nothing for 

 motherhood but burden. 



The prizes which a few women might possibly draw in poli- 

 tics cannot compensate the disaster of precipitating the incu- 

 bus of its dull, repugnant, fruitless toil on the great mass 

 already oppressed. 



