State Legislation 113 



who persist in writing one letters of praise, abuse, 

 and advice on every conceivable subject is appalling ; 

 and the writers are of every grade, from the lunatic 

 and the criminal up. The most difficult to deal with 

 are the men with hobbies. There is the Protestant 

 fool, who thinks that our liberties are menaced by 

 the machinations of the Church of Rome; and his 

 companion idiot, who wants legislation against all 

 secret societies, especially the Masons. Then there 

 are the believers in "isms" of whom the women- 

 suffragists stand in the first rank. Now I have al- 

 ways been a believer in woman's rights, but I must 

 confess I have never seen such a hopelessly imprac- 

 ticable set of persons as the woman-suffragists who 

 came up to Albany to get legislation. They simply 

 would not draw up their measures in proper form; 

 when I pointed out to one of them that their pro- 

 posed bill was drawn up in direct defiance of certain 

 of the sections of the Constitution of the State he 

 blandly replied that he did not care at all for that, 

 because the measure had been drawn up so as to be 

 in accord with the Constitution of Heaven. There 

 was no answer to this beyond the very obvious one 

 that Albany was in no way akin to Heaven. The 

 ultra-temperance people not the moderate and sen- 

 sible ones are quite as impervious to common-sense. 

 A member's correspondence is sometimes amus- 

 ing. A member receives shoals of letters of advice, 

 congratulation, entreaty, and abuse, half of them 

 anonymous. Most of these are stupid; but some 

 are at least out of the common. 



