The Indianapolis journal., 1896-09-20


when this tall eager clarion-voiced woman
rises her hearers may believe that she is
utterly wrong-headed and be sure that the
very class that she pitifs would be the
first to be overwhelmed by the ruin that
triumph of her theories would insure; yet
they never doubt that she herself is hon
once Western hearer. finding nothing
else at her tongues control stammered:
You seem very much in earnest, Mrs.
The tears rose TO Mrs. Leases eyes. ''oh,
my dear woman" she exclaimed, you
can't know how IN earnest I am"
Mrs. Diggs and Mrs. Cougar are slighter
the same sincerity 1t is not creditable to
the vaunted instinct of woman that most
women politicians should take 10 plausible,
rotten social and economic theories as nat
urally as children take to poisonous sweets,
but the facts seem to support the charge
Nor is il difficult to understand the posi-
all self educated women. and. previous TO
| their campaign experience; women with t5a
sympathetic, l may say the sentimental,
temperament.
from iron truths: it rushes to remedies.
whether the remedies have the guarantee
of ever having remedied anything or not.
1t is sympa thetic. 1t is hopeful, 1T is any
thing but clear-sighted or logical. Conse-
quently a large degree of miscellaneous
culture and many moral beauties may con-
sort amicably in the mind of the senti-
mental temperament with business views
beneath contempt.
WOMEN TOO SENI1MENIAL.
A sentimentalist with logic small (as the
phrenologists phrase it) may believe in per-
petual motion, or blue glass. or the imme-
diate end of the world. or Christian sci
ence or that the more plentiful the supply
of silver the greater is price, in young
Mr.. Bryan of Nebraska, in Mrs. Howe's
bank. He she, beholding that most APP
paling, most pitful spectacle in our times,
the man who is willing to work but cannot
get work, will have the heart wrung God
forgive the man woman whose heart is
not wrung by that sightO, but he will not
patiently consider the cause for this stag
nation in industry, lest the remedy pro-
posed be worse than the disease, even (as
many of us believe sometimes) the cause
of the disease Not he; of all the cures in
sight he will take, not the one with sound
record in the past, but the one promising
the most. Now, the quack always prom
ises more than the regular physician and
the SWindler never haggles over the rate of
interest like the honest borrower. But the
sympathetic, illogical lover of mankind
never resist the hattery of the future. He
is never willing to believe that the human
tree cannot be made to grow by machin-
cry. 1t is not human nature or lean har-
vests that make hard times; it is always
legislation. And as legislation is the root
of all evil, so, also. is 1t the cure.
The sentimentalist believes in laws, not
in law. And it is a further popularity of
less as it is blind. But, indeed its blind
ness which is the dream-haunted blindness
of stupidity, is the cause of its reckless
ness. 1t is like a child on a runaway car,
plunging. down hill, exhilarated with the
motion, knowing nothing of the crash and
the black water in waiting.
Women sentimentalists are more reck-
less if anything, than men. But women,
in general, are restrained from political
mischief by other elements in their nature
besides sympathy. They take their opin-
them in large measure This may be
very reprehensible and weak, but the pres
ent writer, who tries to see facts as they
are; is obliged to place the proportion as
high as ninety-nine in one hundred. Wom-
en-, also, are naturally conservative and
naturally Conscientious
All these forces make against women
radicals and women socialists. But the
same forces have worked the other way
in certain sections of the tar West and
South. There are certain parts of the far
West-not the middle West-where there
are wonderful harveSts when there is rain;
but rain does not always come. Unhap-
PLY. also, capital, foolish in it's daring
as its timidity. has flowed over these arid
wastes: investment companies have sprung
up Almost any farmer has been able to
borrow money on almost any farm. The
consequence is that in many cases the
original borrowers have sold their farms
with the mortgages on them. and the sec
ondary owners have found themselves face
to face with a Gisproportionate burden on
the land, a poor year and falling prices.
At one end of the line there is an Eastern
widow who has invested her scanty de-
pendence in the safest of loans. mort
gage on farm lands,' and at the other a
desperate earth tiler, who works fourteen
hours a day and sees the gap between. his
expenses and his income widening all the
time. Very likely the latter has bought
his overrated land with glowing hopes of
paying for it in two three years (as
often has been donel, and the contrast
between his hopes and his disappointment
makes him all the bitterer.
such men are too desperate to reason.
And to such men come the politicians,
viewing certain defeat unless they can
make new promises and shout a new war
ers prices and halve his debts and over
turn the classes for the benefit of the
masses, and do any other little thing that
he wants. The inevitable result is discon-
tent. And therefore the women are only
voicing the opinion of their hus-
bands and fathers and brothers. They
have simply lost their heads over the
misery that they have seen. And they
have not a wide enough vision to see how
narrow is the field that they survey; nor a
wide enough knowledge to understand that
what Kansas and Nebraska need is not
free silver, but irrigation: not repudiation-
but capital enough to make their country
profitable; not reform, but horse sense
But the situation is natural as it is
deplorable. These hard-working, half-edu-
Gated women, whose hearts are aching with
pity, have dcvoured the shallow but pic
turesque arguments of the prophets of a
silver-plated millennium. And once having
accepted the faith they are defending II
with a womans headlong zeal, a woman's
blind devotion and womans self-sacri-
flee.
"Oh, the pity of it, the pity of it, Iago.''