Life — June 21, 1894 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

400 OUR FRESH AIR FUND. ] § g00d times and bad times alike, the children of the poor suffer from the city's heat. If prevailing conditions have affected any of Lire’s readers, which we hope is not the case, we trust they will not let the fact that they have to reduce the amount of their contributions to the Fresh Air Fund deter them from sending what is within their means. Previously acknowledged,..$s05.2 | From Joe's Penny Box From the * Willing Fé sco | Helen. Phipps SOME REMARKS ON MEN, WOMEN AND GHOSTS. AVELOCK ELLIS'S remarkable study in sociology, entitled “Man and Woman,” which is as notable for its scientific fairness as for the popular way in which tke subject is presented, contains a conclusion in the last chapter which ought to set at rest a great many uneasy minds in the present Woman's Suffrage contest. He says: “The respective fitness of men and of women for any kind of work or any kind of privilege can only be ascertained by actual open experi- ment; and as the conditions for such experiment are never twice the same, it can never be positively affirmed that anything has been settled once for all, When such experiment is successful, so much the better for the race; when it is unsuccessful, the minority who have broken natural law, alone suffer. An exaggerated anxiety lest natural law be overthrown 1s misplaced. The world is not so insecurely poised. We may preserve an attitude of entire equanimity in the face of social readjustment.” How consoling that is for the far-seeing men who feel that if women vote they will get into a peck of trouble! They probably will, but that is part of the great game of Nature; you may have your fun, but if you have broken a natural law you will pay for it. Meanwhile, man may enjoy the complication in “an attitude of entire equanimity "—for it isn’t his funeral. Nature is looking after him, and she sits up nights and is on duty all day Sundays to do it. It is probable that she has already laid the pipes to make the Woman Voter an increasingly homely creature with atrocious taste in the matter of frocks and bonnets; so that men will steer clear of her, and in the long run only the pretty girls who won't vote if they have the privilege, will get husbands and raise families of other pretty girls who will, by heredity, shun the ballot as they would poison. When the time comes that to have her name on the polling list is equal to a declaration that she is an old maid, woman will abandon the privilege she fought for, and the law (if there should be one) will perish of desuetude. And during all those years, man in his “attitude of entire equanimity ” will have the social problem very much simpli- fied for him, because all the disagreeable women in a com- munity will be registered at the expense of the Stat Thus is Nature justified of her children, and the great world keeps her poise—even though the State of New York goes wrong! * * . N the little volume by F, Marion Crawford, published in the Autonym Library (Putnam) under the title “ The * LIFE: TWO SIDES TO ‘THOSE SHOCKED, ON THE EAST END OF THE PIAZZA WERE SOMEWHAT FSS ey BUT THERE WAS NO GOOD REASON FOR IT. Upper Berth,” there are two short tales which illustrate admirably the two ways of writing a ghost story. In the first, * The Upper Berth,” the ghost is not explained; in the other, “ By the Waters of Paradise,” the ghost is explained in a most agreeable manner, so that hero and reader fall in love with her. Both are ghosts of an unusually fine brand, and the gentle reader can take his choice, or read both, as his nerves permit. But the present writer unhesitatingly asserts his belief that the only kind of ghost story worthy the name is one with a comicbooks.com