Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/396

372

, March 1.


 * —From Springfield, I went to Bloomington, lectured before the Young Men's Association to a large audience, and met there many liberal men and women. I found that the Rev. Mr. Harrison had just fired a gun in the town paper on the lack of logic in the Chicago Convention and women's intuitions in general. It amuses me to hear the nonsense these men talk. They say God never intended woman to reason, they shut their college doors against her so that she can not study that manly accomplishment, and then they blame her for taking a short cut to the same conclusion they reach in their roundabout, lumbering processes of ratiocination. Do these gentlemen wish us to set aside God's laws, pick up logic on the sidewalks, and go step by step to a point we can reach with one flash of intuition? As long as we have the gift of catching truth by the telegraph wires, neither the sage of Bloomington nor Robert Laird Collyer of Chicago need ask us to go jogging after it in a stage-coach, perchance to be stuck in the mud on the highways as they are. It is enough to make angels weep to see how the logicians, skilled in the schools, are left floundering on every field before the simple intuitions of American womanhood.

Finding the ladies of Bloomington somewhat scarified and nervous under the Reverend's firing, like the good Samaritan, I tried to pour oil and wine on their wounded spirits, by exalting intuition, and with a pitiful and patronizing tone deploring the slowness, the obtuseness, the materialism of most of the sons of Adam. It had its effect. They soon dried their tears, and with returning self-respect, told me of all the wonderful things women were doing in that town. From the scintillations of wit, the fun and the laughter, an outsider would never have supposed that we were an oppressed class, and so hopelessly degraded in the statute laws and Constitution. After the meeting we had a long talk with the clerical assailant, and were happy to find that the good man's pen had done his heart great injustice. He is rather morbid on the question of logic; but the most melancholy symptom of his disease is his hatred of The Revolution. He says it is a very wicked paper, that he had felt it his duty to warn his congregation against taking it, thus depriving us of, at least, five hundred subscribers, though he read it himself (under protest) regularly every week. Strange what a fascination evil things have even for those who minister at the altar! He advised me to strangle Train, gibbet the financial editor, snub the proprietor, and to say no more in the paper on the questions of political economy, until we had one and all studied the subject. Dear Revolution, when I listened to those things, I had the same sinking of the heart that I used to feel when neighbors complained that my boys were running over their house-tops, dropping stones down their chimneys, ringing their bells then running away, throwing balls in their windows, and teazing the girls on the sidewalk. Now, I do hope, dear Revolution, you will not bring my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, but turn over a new leaf and adopt some Christian means to get back these five hundred subscribers. The reverend gentleman said one thing that was like balm to my bruised spirit. He liked everything over the initials P. P. and E. C. S. Sub rosa, P. P., we must try and circumvent Train, and fill the paper ourselves.