Eighty years ago women could not vote anywhere, except to a very limited extent in Sweden, and in a few other places in the old world.

The status of woman in the United States fifty years ago, the progressive steps by which it has been improved, present conditions, future probabilities—in fact, a résumé of the great movement in which Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been the central figure through two generations—this is the subject 0437assigned me to consider in the brief space of one magazine article!

The title I claim for Mrs. Stanton is that of leader of women. Women do not enjoy one privilege to-day beyond those possessed by their foremothers, which was not demanded by he before the present generation was born. Her published speeches will verify this statement. In the light of the present, it seems natural that she should have made those first demands for women; but at the time it was done the act was far more revolutionary than was the Declaration of Independence by the colonial leaders. There had been other rebellions against the rule of kings and nobles; men from time immemorial had been accustomed to protest against injustice; but for women to take such action was without a precedent and the most daring innovation in all history. Men of old could emphasize their demands by the sword, and in the present century they have been able to do so by the ballot. While they might, indeed, put their lives in peril, they were always supported by a certain amount of sympathy from the public. Women could neither fight nor vote; they were not sustained even by those of their own sex; and, while they incurred no physical risk, they imperilled their reputation and subjected themselves to mental and spiritual crucifixion. Therefore I hold that the calling of that first Woman's Right Convention in 1848 by Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott and two or three other brave Quaker women, was one of the most courageous acts on record.

It must be remembered that at this time a woman's convention never had been heard of, with the exception of the few which had been called, early in the anti-slavery movement, by the women who had been driven out of the men's meetings and had formed their own society; but even these were almost wholly managed by men. A few individual women had publicly advocated equality of rights—the number could be more than counted on one's finger—but a convention for this purpose and an organized demand had been till then undreamed of. The vigor and scope of the declaration 0448of sentiments which was presented and adopted at this memorable meeting, held at Mrs. Stanton's home, in Seneca Falls, New York, are in nowise diminished by comparison with the declaration of the forefathers proclaimed exactly seventy-two years before. It began, indeed, with the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, substituting “women’ for “men” and “colonies”; and it continued:

“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world: “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

“He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she has no voice.

“He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.

“Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

“He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

“He has taken form her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

“He has made her morally an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant or marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement.

“He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper cause, and to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of woman—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

“After depriving her of all rights as married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognize her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

“He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.

“He has closed against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. In theology, medicine, and law she is not known.

“He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.

“He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.

“He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.

“He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming 0459it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience ad to her God.

“He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

“Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because woman do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

“In entering upon the great work before us we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the state and national legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this convention will be followed by a series of conventions, embracing every part of the country.”

Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.”

To emphasize these most radical sentiments the following resolutions also were adopted:

“The great precept of nature is conceded to be, ‘that man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness.’ Blackstone, in his Commentaries, remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their validity and all their authority, mediately and immediately, from this original; therefore,

“Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature and of no validity; for this is ‘superior in obligation to any other.’

“Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature and therefore of no force or authority.

“Resolved, That woman is man's equal—was intended to be so by the Creator—and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.

“Resolved, That the women of this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance by asserting that they have all the rights they want.

Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies.

Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy and refinement of behavior that is required of woman in the social state should also be required of man, and the same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.

“Resolved, That the objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill-grace from those who encourage 04610courage by their attendance her appearance on the stage, in the concert or in feats of the circus.

“Resolved. That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.

Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.

“Resolved, That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities.

“Resolved, therefore. That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used and in any assemblies proper to be held; and this being a self-evident truth, growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature, any custom or authority adverse to it, whether modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to regarded as a self-evident falsehood and at war with the interests of mankind.”

In all the conventions which have been held during the past fifty-four years, the impassioned address made, the resolutions presented, the hearings before legislative bodies, there has been nothing to add to these declarations made by a woman only thirty-three years old, born and bred in the midst of the most rigid social, civil and religious conservatism. They illustrate vividly the conditions which existed in that day, when the simplest rudiments of education were deemed sufficient for women; when only a half-dozen unremunerative employments were open to them and any work outside the home placed a stigma on the worker; when a woman's right to speak in public was more bitterly contested than her right to the suffrage is to-day. The storm of ridicule and denunciation which broke over the heads of the women who took part in this convention never has been exceeded in the coarsest and most vituperative political campaign ever conducted. The attacks were led by the pulpit, whose influence fifty years ago was far greater than at present and whose power over women was supreme. The press of the country did not suffer itself to be outdone; but, taking its cue from the metropolitan papers of New York, contributed its full quota of caricature and misrepresentation.

At the beginning of 1848, the English Common Law was in force practically everywhere in the United States. Its treatment of women was a blot on civilization only equalled in blackness by the slavery of the negro. The latter, technically at least, has now disappeared. The former dies slowly, because it cannot be eradicated by fire and sword. Lord Coke called this Common Law “the perfection of reason.” Under its provisions the position of the wife was thus stated by Blackstone:

“The very being or existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and covert she performs everything. She is, therefore, called in our Law-French a femme-covert, is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron or lord.

“The husband also, by the old law, might give his wife, moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her by domestic chastisement in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices or children. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds, and the husband was prohibited from using any violence to his wife, except as lawfully and reasonably belongs to a husband for the sake of governing and disciplining his wife. The Civil Law gave the husband the same or a larger authority over his wife, allowing him for some misdemeanors to beat his wife severely with whips and cudgels; for others only to administer moderate chastisement.”

Other provisions of this law were as follows:

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the legal existence of the women is merged in that of her husband. He is her baron or lord, bound to supply her with shelter, food, clothing and medicine, and is entitled to her earnings and the use and custody of her person, which he may seize wherever he may find it.”

“The husband, being bound to provide for his wife the necessaries of life, and being responsible for her morals and the good order of the household, may choose and govern the domicile, select her associates, separate her from her relatives, restrain her religious and personal freedom, compel her to cohabit with him, correct her faults by mild means, and, if necessary, chastise her with moderation, as though she was his apprentice or child. This is in respect to the terms of the marriage contract and the infirmity of the sex.”

It does not seem necessary to add further particulars as to the condition of women in the middle of the century just closed and at the time Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the almost superhuman task of setting them free from the bondage of centuries. The first cleft in the infamy of the Common Law was made almost simultaneously by the legislatures of New York, and Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1848, by 04812special statutes giving a married woman the right to hold property. This was the first glimmer of freedom from legal slavery which ever had appeared to women; and it is not surprising that it scarcely penetrated the darkness in which they had been enveloped for untold ages, or that they rejected with scorn those who came to deliver them.

To follow in detail the steps by which women have reached their present position of comparative social, educational, financial and legal independence, would be to write a chapter for each of the fifty years which have intervened since the first few brave souls dared lift up their voices in a cry for liberty. The organized movement for the emancipation of women began in earnest soon after the close of the Civil War. Every one of the past thirty-five years has witnessed the breaking of a link in the chain. The going forth of hundreds of thousands of men from the farm, the work-shop, the factory, the store—from every field of employment—to swell the ranks of the army, made it absolutely necessary for women to step into their places in order that the countless wheels of the world's work should not stop. The vacancies left by those who never returned, and the rapidly-growing tendency to remove domestic products from the home to the factory, practically settled the question of woman's entering the wage-earning occupations.

The period immediately after the war was marked by the speedy increase and enlargement of state universities and the admission of women. Their example was followed by many of the other colleges and universities of the country, and in 1890 by the founding of the two great endowed institutions, Stanford and Chicago, with the admission of women to every department. Although the latter has just made the egregious blunder of modifying its original plan, this action represents only the individual scheme of one man and not a reactionary tendency. The question of the higher education of woman may be regarded as decided in her favor.

The right of women to organize for public work is now universally recognized and approved. They have at present in the United States over one hundred national organizations, 04913with thousands of local clubs ad societies comprising millions of members, and their influence over the general conditions of the various communities is beyond computation. The right of women to speak in public is not only everywhere conceded but, given a man a woman with equal abilities, the average audience would prefer to hear the latter.

The legal features of the revolution have been quite as marked as its other phases. An examination, doubtless, would show that in not one state does the Common Law now prevail in its entirety. In many of them it has been largely obliterated by special statutes. There has been no retrogressive legislation with respect to the status of women before the law. In the majority of the states, a married woman may now own and control property, carry on business and possess her earnings, make a will a contract, bring suit in her own name, act as administrator and testify in the courts. In one-fifth of the states, she has equal guardianship with the father over the minor children. Where formerly there was but one clause for divorce, the wife may now obtain a divorce in almost every state for habitual drunkenness, cruelty, failure to provide and desertion on the part of the husband; and he can no longer, as of old even though the guilty, retain sole possession of the children and the property. The general tendency of legislation for women is progressive, and there is not a doubt that this will continue to be the case.

I do not wish to be understood for a moment, however, as maintaining the woman stands on a perfect equality with men in any of the above-mentioned departments—in the industries, education, organization, public speaking or the laws. She simply has made immense gains in all, and her standing has been completely revolutionized since Mrs. Stanton announced the beginning of a new Reformation. Woman never will have equality of rights anywhere, she never will hold those she now has by an absolute tenure, until she possesses the fundamental right of self-representation. This fact is so obvious as to need no argument. Had this 05014right been conceded at the start, the other would have speedily followed; and the leaders among women, instead of spending the last half-century in a constant struggle to obtain their civil ad political rights have contributed their splendid services to the general upbuilding and strengthening of the government. The effort for this most important of rights has had to contend not only, like the rest, with the obstinate prejudices and customs of the ages, but also with still more stubborn condition of its hard and fast intrenchment in constitutional law. It is not merely a board of trustees or a body of legislators who must be converted to the justice of extending this right to women, but also the great masses of men, including the ignorant, the foreign-born, the small-minded and the vicious. A majority of the men in every state must give their consent at the ballot box for women to come into possession of this paramount right. Such has not been the case with any other step in the progress of women.

It is not necessary to consider the minor reasons why the enfranchisement of women has been so long deferred; but, in spite of the almost insuperable obstacles, there has been considerable progress in this direction. In some states, the legislatures themselves can confer a fragmentary suffrage without the ratification of the voters. This has been done in about half of them, Kansas granting the municipal franchise, Louisiana, Montana, and New York, a taxpayers’ franchise, and twenty-two states a vote on matters connected with the public schools. Within the last twelve years, four states have conferred the full suffrage on women—Wyoming and Utah by placing it in the constitutions under which they entered statehood; Colorado and Idaho through a submission of the question to the voters. There is a strong basis for believing that within a few years several other states will take similar action.

The effect upon women themselves of these enlarged opportunities in very direction has been a development which is almost a regeneration. The capability they have shown in the realm of higher education, their achievements 05115in the business world, their capacity for organization, their executive power, have been a revelation. To set women back into the limited sphere of fifty years ago would be to arrest the progress of the whole race. Their evolution has been accompanied by a corresponding development in the moral nature of man, his ideas of temperance and chastity, his sense of justice, his relations to society. In no department of the world's activities are the higher qualities so painfully lacking as in politics, and this is the only one from which women are wholly excluded. Is it not perfectly logical to assume that their influence would be as beneficial here as it has been everywhere else? Does not logic also justify the opinion that, as they have been admitted into every other channel, the political gateways must inevitably be opened?

In 1888, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the leaders of this movement in the United States, where it began, attempted to coöperate with other countries, they found that in only one—Great Britain—had it taken organized shape. By 1902, however, it was possible to form an International Committee, in Washington, D.C., with representatives from five countries. Two years later, in Berlin, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was formed with accredited delegates from organizations in nine countries. This Alliance held a congress in Stockholm during the past summer with delegates from national associations in twenty-four countries where the movement for the enfranchisement of women has taken definite, organized form.

When no November 8, 1910, the state of Washington, by a very large majority vote of its electors, gave the complete franchise to women citizens the subject of woman suffrage passed from the stage of academic discussion to that of a live, practical question; and when on October 10, 1911, California fully enfranchised the women of that state it became one of the political issued of the day. This fact was evident at once in the attitude of the press, which in its news reports gave woman suffrage equal if no superior place to the referendum, recall and other important constitutional amendments which were passed upon at this recent California election. It was equally noticeable in the editorials, especially of papers heretofore opposed, such, for instance, as the New York Tribune, which said: “Now that Washington with 1,142,000 population and California with 2,377,000, have shown their desire to put the political equality idea into practice, the pressure behind it will become more acute and the larger and older states will have to take more serious notice of its existence.”

The experiment heretofore in the United States has been made in the four comparatively new and sparsely settled states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho, where women are greatly outnumbered by men and no large cities exist with their complicated political and social problems. While it is true that human nature is the same everywhere, yet it must be admitted that it these four states there has not been 06327an opportunity for such a real test of woman suffrage as would be necessary to influence the older and more thickly populated ones. Denver, with a little less than 214,000 inhabitants, has afforded the most conspicuous example for study.

Now that the question of woman suffrage is to receive more attention it may be of interest to examine its history in the United States up to date. The very first demand for it was made by women of Eastern States, which will be the last to grant it—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, of New York; Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia; Lucy Stone, of Boston, and a score or two more of the most distinguished women of sixty years ago. The first recognition of the principle by any state was made by progressive Kansas, which came into the Union om 1861 with school suffrage for women in its Constitution. No further advance was made until 1869, when the first legislative council was in session after the organization of Wyoming as a territory. Mrs. Esther Morris, who with her husband had gone out from New York as a pioneer, appealed to the president of the council Col. William H. Bright, for a bill enfranchising women. She was sustained by his wife, and he succeeded in having the bill passed. The council was Democratic and it hoped to embarrass the Republican Governor, John A. Campbell, whom it expected to veto the bill. On the contrary, he signed it; and when two years later the council repealed it he vetoed the repeal. The council was unable to pass it over his veto and no effort to abolish woman suffrage was ever again made in Wyoming. Mrs. Morris was appointed justice of the peace, and of the nearly forty cases she tried none ever was appealed to a higher court. Women sat on juries from the beginning and have continued to fill various offices down to the present day.

In 1889 a convention composed entirely of men met to form a constitution for statehood, and after twenty years’ experience they adopted unanimously as its first clause “equal political rights for all male and female citizens.” The constitution was ratified by more than a three-fourths majority 06428of the people and sent to Congress for approval. That body, always hostile to the enfranchisement of women, fought for three days to have this first clause eliminated and the territorial delegate telegraphed to Wyoming that it looked as if this would have to be done. The Legislature, which was in session, wired back, “We remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without woman suffrage.” The same struggle took place in the United States Senate and pages of the Congressional Record were filled with awful senatorial prophecies as to what would happen to the country if Wyoming should come into the Union with women voters. After days of oratory they were obliged to face the calamity, and President Harrison signed the bill admitting the new state in June, 1890. Thus Wyoming be-became the first commonwealth in the world's history to grant to women the same rights in the government that men possessed. The official statistics show that about 90 percent of the women qualified cast their votes at the annual elections. Not one man of prominence has ever voiced publicly the slightest opposition, while volumes of favorable testimony from those eminent in all departments of the state's activities have been published. Again and again the Legislature has adopted resolutions expressing the highest approval of woman suffrage, urging other states to adopt it and calling upon Congress to submit an amendment of the National Constitution to the various legislatures.

We come now to the second state which has fully enfranchised women—Colorado. When it made its constitution for statehood in 1876 it refused the entreaties of the women to provide in this for their enfranchisement, but it gave them school suffrage. The curious provision was made that the Legislature of the new state might at any time by a majority, instead of the two-thirds required for amendments, enact a law to extend the suffrage without amending the Constitution, but the law must be approved by the majority of the voters; and it was ordered that such a law should be submitted at the first election after the state came into the Union. This was done in 1877 and the men, glorying 06529in their own newly-acquired rights, defeated the measure by a vote of two to one. The women were discouraged and the matter rested till the early '90's, when there were many more of them, and they began to organize their forces. In 1893 the Legislature was in entire control of the Populists and a woman suffrage bill was again sent to the voters. Men, too, had progressed during these years and at the November election it received a majority in favor of 6,347.

The women entered at once upon their new duties and the official records show that during all the past eighteen years they have voted in quite as large a proportion as men. They have evinced no especial desire for office, but more than a dozen have been elected to the Legislature and scores to the various country offices. The office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction has always been filled by a woman. They serve on state boards and commissions and are eligible to jury service. The testimony in favor of the way they have used their ballot is overwhelming and from the highest sources—justices of the Supreme Court, governors, presidents of colleges, clergymen, editors. Not one Colorado man or woman of prominence has ever given public expression to a derogatory word. The strongest proof of the success of woman suffrage in this state, however, came ten years after it had been in operation. The suffrage clause in the Constitution permitted immigrants to vote on their first papers and six month's residence. An amendment was submitted in 1903 requiring a year's residence and using the words “he or she.” It was adopted by 18,000 majority and it safely intrenched woman suffrage in the constitution of the state. With the Populist party eliminated the vote for it was three times as large a before it had been tried. If this increase was due to the women it showed they appreciated their voting power and wished to make it secure; if it was due to men it proved they were satisfied. In either case the result was decisive.

In 1895, two years after the Colorado victory, a convention of Utah men assembled to make a constitution for Statehood. The Legislature in 1870 had given full suffrage 06630to women—as it had power to do in a territory—and they had used it largely until 1887. That year Congress, thru some inscrutable logic, took away the franchise from all the women, Gentile as well as Mormon, to stop the practice of polygamy! This convention was composed of both Gentiles and Mormons, and after a thoro discussion a strong woman suffrage plank was put into the new Constitution. At the November election it was submitted to Gentile and Mormon voters and carried by 28,618 ayes, 2,678 noes. This was the answer of Utah men after an experience with woman suffrage of seventeen years. This Constitution received no objection by Congress. The women of this state were far better organized and worked much harder for their political freedom than those of any other up to that time. They have used their franchise generally and wisely; no complaints or criticisms have ever come from Utah to the contrary. Women have been sent to both houses of the Legislature, have filled state, county and city office, served on many boards and gone as delegates to Presidential conventions.

The story of Idaho is short and there is no great struggle for the ballot to record. It was admitted into the Union in 1890. Before and after that year Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway, the pioneer suffragist of Oregon, had canvassed territory and state and appealed to the Legislature and constitution convention. She was strongly supported by individual men and women of Idaho, but there was no organized effort until 1893. The Republicans were in full control of the Legislature in 1895 and the resolution to submit an amendment was almost unanimous. The next year Republican, Democratic, Populist and Free Silver party conventions endorsed it and it was carried at the November election by a vote of almost two to one. At the next election three women were sent to the Legislature; one State Superintendent of Instruction; fifteen county superintendents, four county treasurers elected. This proportion has been kept up and there have been a number of deputy sheriffs elected. There is nothing but the highest testimony as to the part of women 06731in the politics of the state. They constitute 42 per cent of the population and by the official statistics they cast 40 per cent of the vote in Boise, the capital, and over 35 per cent in the rest of the state. The hardships of getting to the polls thru the snow and over the mountains can hardly be described. Women sometimes ride twenty miles on horseback to vote.

After this gain of four states in six years by the suffragists the opponents took active measures to prevent the submission of the question in other states. In the few cases where this was done the combination of corporations, liquor interests and party “machines” was impossible to overcome. The domination of politics by these forces was so complete that there was no chance for any moral questions, and nothing was left but the slow process of educating public sentiment to demand that the voice of women should be heard in this wilderness. Then came the great “insurgent” movement in the western states and, as the direct result, the submitting of a woman suffrage amendment in 1910 by almost unanimous vote of the Washington Legislature. Here again there had been practical experience. In 1883 the Territorial Legislature gave to women the full rights of the ballot and at the spring election and again in the autumn they cast one-fourth of the votes, altho there were less than one-third as many women as men in the territory. During the three and a half years that they possessed the suffrage the official returns several times showed a larger percentage of women than of men voting, even with all the physical handicaps of these pioneer days. In 1886, some question of constitutionally having arisen, the Legislature strengthened the act. In 1887 the vicious elements secured a court verdict that the bill was not properly titled and the Legislature passed in a third time perfect in every respect.

A convention was about to prepare a constitution for statehood and these elements were determined it should not include woman suffrage. It was arranged that at the spring election of 1889 the vote of a certain saloon keeper's wife should be refused. Her case was rushed thru to the Supreme 06832Court, and two out of three members decided that the equal suffrage law was void because a territorial legislature had no right to extend the suffrage! The very act under which Washington was organized specifically gave it this right, and under a similar act women had voted twenty-one years in the territory of Wyoming and seventeen in that of Utah. This decision is only matched by that in the Dred Scott case in 1857. The women were illegally disfranchised, they were executed from the new Constitution and all they could obtain was the submission that year of woman suffrage as a separate question. They were not themselves allowed to vote on it and it was said to be defeated by over 19,000. Nine years later, in 1898, the women summoned courage to make another campaign and then the majority against them was announced to be considerably less than 10,000. Years afterward a man who had taken part in them stated publicly that the most barefaced frauds were committed and that the amendment really had been carried.

In 1910 came the political revolution in Washington, where the voters threw off the “machine” yoke and honest men of all parties secured a free election and a fair count. The women made the ablest campaign for the suffrage ever known, with the splendid result that it was carried in every county in the state and received a majority of nearly three to one—the largest victory ever achieved. The way in which they registered by the tens of thousands in Seattle the following month, “recalled” the Mayor, turned out the council and chief of police and regenerated the city—and later performed the same service for Tacoma—this is of too recent date to need extended mention. It advanced the cause of woman suffrage thruout the whole country and across the ocean on either side.

The first results were seen in California, which in the state at large had been swept clean of its corrupt political forces by the great wave of insurgency. The press representatives who had been going to Sacramento for years said they never had seen so able, sincere and upright a body of men as the legislators who submitted the reform amendments, 06933all of which were adopted at the recent election, including woman suffrage. The women remembered with anguish of spirit the magnificent campaign they had made in 1896 only to be betrayed and sold by the political leaders. With largely augmented numbers and full of faith in the new order they made the fight, but it required the decent men of the whole state to overcome the corrupt vote of San Francisco and Oakland. Now in a state that has been in the Union over sixty years, and in several big cities, we shall have the supreme test of woman suffrage. Will another year see victory in Oregon and women enfranchised on the entire Pacific Coast?

In our country there is encouragement on every side. The Kentucky Legislature by a large majority in both Houses has granted to all women who can read and write a vote on all matters connected with the public schools and eligibility to all school affairs. The most significant feature of this victory is the bill was sponsored by the State federation of women's clubs.

The convention of 119 men, sitting at Columbus, Ohio, to remodel the constitution of that state, has voted more than two to one to add an amendment giving full suffrage to women. All amendments must be acted upon by the electors and this one must run the risk of defeat.

In Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas and Oregon constitutional amendments have been submitted to confer the complete suffrage on women, and these will be voted on in November. In Oregon the suffragists are receiving an unusual amount of assistance from men, who have formed a strong Men's suffrage league. They feel that it is high time they should do for the women of their state what the men of California to south, Washington the north and Idaho to the east have done, and it is almost unthinkable that they would allow the enemies of woman suffrage to defeat the measure. Here, too, it is a great joy to see the women's clubs aroused to their responsibilities and allying themselves with the work of the Suffrage association.

In Kansas the wives of the governor, chief justice of the supreme court, chancellor of the university and a former governor are at the head of the organized work, while women in all parts of the state are opening a lively campaign.

Proximity in Chicago will enable Wisconsin and Michigan to have the help of that city's leading suffragists, among them the beloved Jane Addams.

The legislatures of Maryland and Virginia have rejected the woman-suffrage bills by large majorities. Over six hundred 07236of the leading women of Maryland went before that legislature and saw their treated with such contempt that they went home in a very “militant” state of mind. In Massachusetts, at the request of the State federation of labor, the Suffrage association gave them full charge of the bill, although assisting in the arguments before the legislators. It was defeated, of course, but by the smallest majority on record.

New York has caused the suffragists the longest contest of any state. Only a few times has it ever been possible to get the bill out of the committees so as to compel the legislators to show their colors. This winter has been one of those times, and the bill passed both houses, but was reconsidered and laid on the table. The women of New Jersey succeeded in forcing the bill out of committee and may get a vote on it. These instances show that the suffragists are gaining.

In California and Washington the women have passed beyond this phase of the struggle. They say it still seems like a dream, that it is all over, and that they can now take up the great work they have longed to do but could not because they were absorbed in trying to get the means by which to do it. They are being placed on boards and committees of all kinds and say that never before did they know the true meaning of the word “chivalry.”

Press despatches report that the Chinese National Parliament at Nankin has granted equal suffrage to the women of China, the law to take effect immediately, and that one woman, Yik Yuan Ying, a college graduate, has been elected a member of Parliamentary from the province of Canton. Women voters, according to this despatch, will be subject to the same restrictions as men—that is, they must be able to read and write, must be property owners, and 20 years of age.

A letter to the Boston Herald from Canton, the head and heart of the modern progressive movement in China, says: “The Provincial Assembly, since the fire which destroyed its beautiful hall, has been meeting in the new theatre near the east end of the river front. It is composed of representative revolutionists from the different districts. As a sign of the progressive character of the people here, ten women have been seated as representatives.”

From the new Portuguese Republic comes the report that under the Electoral law, just passed, a limited number of women in Portugal have been given the parliamentary franchise. The same law puts a property qualification on the men, but so slight a one that manhood suffrage is practically established. However, the number of women enfranchised by this law will be comparatively small because of the age limit and educational test.

About a year ago Dr. Carolina Angelo, a woman who since died, entered her name on the registry as a citizen. Her application for the vote formed a test case. The judge ruled that she was entitled to citizenship. By this legal decision women in Portugal were declared eligible for the franchise on the same grounds as men. By the new law, the Senate has now partially confirmed this legal decision by granting the vote to women over 25 years of age, who have passed a certain educational test.

The movement to secure equal suffrage is part of the larger movement to realize the democratic ideal in human society. Its growth is coincident with society's growing esteem for the individual.

In the progress of legislation and judicial interpretation concerning women and their rights and privileges, one fact stands out in prominence. Each concession has been an acknowledgment of individual personality. At the time when our forefathers declared that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, it was not recognized anywhere in law or in human society that a woman is a complete and self-competent personality. Now that fact has been so far established in human society and law as to warrant full government recognition. The mark and badge of full governmental recognition of personality is the ballot.

If full recognition is not the logical end, the granting of partial rights should never have been begun. Women should have been kept in complete subjection, higher education should have continued to be a thing denied and the theoretical unity of every woman with some man should not have been invaded by the humane progress of legislation and legal interpretation. Logically, the granting of partial suffrage calls for the granting of complete suffrage. Most of our states have been suffrage to women on some subjects, and six have granted complete suffrage. It is no wonder that English women, even though they have voting power on practically everything except for members of parliament, still remain unsatisfied, nay, are more discontented 07540than ever before. It is no wonder that American women, who have been given a partial franchise, also want the logical process completed. They have been given rights in larger and larger measure; they have been permitted a more public sphere of ordinary activity; economic pressure has turned millions of them into bread-winners; and the social status of all of them has been so altered that the last step must now be taken or all previous steps are meaningless. They have been educated up to the very point when the last prize is just before them, and it must not be denied. They have been permitted to attain a state of self-competency, and the one mark of self-competency—the badge of sovereignty. the highest governmental recognition of individual personality—must now be conferred.

The proposal for a plebiscite of women to decide in any state whether that state should provide for their complete enfranchisement is based upon no fundamental idea of suffrage. It is not even a fundamental question to ask whether they would use the ballot if they had it. No set of people, either in America or in Europe, on the eve of possible enfranchisemet, was ever required to meet such tests. Rights have always been extended on high grounds of public justice and morality, and in recognition of personality. Suffragists do not fear such tests; but the tests, if applied, would not be decisive. The case does not rest finally on the wishes of the set of people to be benefitted, or upon the use they will make of the privilege. It rests finally upon the moral obligation of a free state to recognize a person as a person. The statement of the British statesman applies with much greater force to the women of to-day than it did to any class ever before enfranchised—“A free government and a large number of people excluded from its privileges cannot exist together.”

When the ownership of property was deemed a necessary qualification for the vote, as it still is in most lands, “Taxation without representation is tyranny” was the only plea offered for the extension of the suffrage in new classes of men. The colonial battle cry did not mean the ballot; it meant the collective right of the American settlements to representation. Very soon, however, when they new constitutions were being formulated, it was interpreted to apply to individual men. Upon that basis, and for that reason, the vote was extended to men in the United States, and by that claim they held it until a broader principle eliminated the tax qualification. That argument still holds good; women are taxed. In the one state of New York, women hold property in total valuation considerably higher than that held by all the Colonists at the time of the Revolution. It is manifestly a tyrannical discrimination to take from citizens that which is theirs for the purpose of creating a common fund to be expended for the common good, when some citizens 08045are permitted to vote upon that expenditure and others are not. Opponents triumphantly exclaim in justification of this difference, that minors and foreigners are taxed. True, but boys vote at twenty-one years, and foreigners may do so after a five year's residence, while the distinction in the case of women is perpetual.

Evidently the Colonists were not equal at the beginning to the enforcement of the second and bolder principle of the Declaration of Independence: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Later, under the teachings of Thomas Jefferson, it was interpreted as a workable proposition. Its advocates said in its defense that every man had a stake in the government, and therefore he must have a corresponding ballot's share in the law making and law enforcing power of the nation, in order to defend his stake; that every man must be equally interested with every other to develop the common welfare to the highest degree possible, and therefore he must have his opinion counted.

These arguments won, and for this reason all white men not yet enfranchisement received the vote.

A century ago, government by the “will of the people,” in the country meant the rule of rich white males over poor white and black males. Later in meant the rule of white, Negro and Indian males, born or naturalized in the United States, over all women. But women are people; they are taxed, they are governed, and they have an interest in the common good to be defended. Every reason ever urged for the enfranchisement of men speaks as logically for the enfranchisement of women. Manifestly, if the powers of government are only just when founded upon the “consent of the governed,” and this plea gave the vote to men, the powers of the United States government are not just, since they have been derived from the consent of half the governed. Therefore, women are asking the old question with the modern application: How does it happen that men are born to govern, and we to obey? Are men divinely ordained to be perpetual hereditary sovereigns, and women to be hereditary 08146subjects? If this is the order, where is the proof? When, where and to whom, did God or Nature reveal the fact? The only answer ever made to this question is: The revelation is found in the instincts of men and women who shrink in natural righteous horror from a change so fundamental. Alas, since the world began, the ignorant frightened, “natural instincts” of the masses have held back every step of evolution, and have inaugurated many of bloody “reign of terror.” “Natural instincts” have been overturned so often by the progress of civilization, that little respect for such authority remains. In fact the source of opposition to woman suffrage lies in the universal distaste for new things and not in instinct at all. It is merely the time-honored fear, which “makes us rather bear these ills we have, than fly to those we know not of.”

The fears of the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia tell them as certainly that men have no claim to the suffrage, as those of the American legislator tell him that women have no political rights. The fears of China forbid a woman to walk on natural feet and the fears of the Turk put his womankind in the harem. The fears of Mrs. Humphry Ward tell her it is consistent with the natural and divine order of things that women should vote in municipal elections, but contrary to God and Nature for them to vote for members of Parliament. An anti-suffragist not long since made a public plea that the Board of education in the City of New York should be elective, and that women as well as men should elect its members; yet her fears told her that the highest order of society would be overturned should the same women vote for mayor. The American would not hesitate to pronounce the fears of China and Turkey which deny personal liberty to woman as expressions of brutal barbarism. The Australian who has yielded to the inevitable, enfranchised women, and recovered from the shock, would declare with as firm conviction that the American who grants the sovereignty of a vote to the immigrants from all quarters of the globe, the Negroes and Indians, and yet denies it to women, is a mere democratic 08247masquerader. Such divergences do not arise from intuition, but from difference in enlightenment.

Under the influence of steady agitation the issue grows simpler every year. Woman suffrage is already an established fact on one fifteenth of the earth's territory; and from Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Denmark, Iceland, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho comes the same overwhelming testimony. With opportunity to do so, women vote as generally as do men. They vote as independently and as intelligently. They do not neglect their husbands, or children, of homes of politics. They do not become unsexed and poor imitations of men. There is no increase of divorce, no falling off in number of marriages, or the number of births. No harm in any way has come to women, to men, to children, or to the states, while on the contrary, much positive good has been accomplished.

“Women do not want to vote, why thrust the suffrage upon them?” The incontrovertible fact is that no class of unenfranchised men any land ever wanted the ballot in such large proportion to the total number as do women of the United States; nor is there a single instance of a man suffrage movement, so persistent, uncompromising and self-sacrificing as the woman suffrage movement. Sooner or later, just men will answer this excuse for postponing legislative action in the matter by the counter question, why demand of women a test never made of men? Since it is proved that women will vote when they may, is that not sufficient? The suffrage is permissive, not mandatory; those who want to vote, will do so, while those who do not want to vote, will refrain from so doing. It must be remembered, too, that the same type of women who now protest against the extension of the suffrage, have opposed with equal vigor every step of progress in the woman movement. They pronounced the effort to secure to married women the control of their own property, an insult to men. They united their anathemas to those of the press and pulpit in bitter condemnation of the early women college graduates, women 08348physicians and platform speakers. They have never sought any extension in privileges with one exception. Twice New York anti-suffragists have memorialized the governor of the state to request that women should be appointed to positions upon all public boards possible, as a suitable method of utilizing the wasting talents of women on the one hand, and to assuage the “growing unrest among women” on the other. As these women have availed themselves of all privileges as soon as established, and are now asking for public office, which is commonly regarded as an adjunct of political power, it is safe to assume, that they will exercise the suffrage when once it is obtained.

When an equal proportion of all classes of the women's votes is called out, our educated and our American-born vote will be increased, and our uneducated and foreign-born vote decreased, in the final proportion. Therefore, while we cannot look to women's votes for such an inundation of purity as certain chivalric souls would love to think, we can assure ourselves of no deterioration, but on the contrary an increase through them of the average intellectual culture and acquaintance with American institutions in the electorate.

Moreover, we cannot ignore the fact that women, even when their opportunity and the demands we make of them are as great as they should be, will remain in certain ways normally different from men. Women are mothers, and men are not. When all psychic marvels and parlor non-sense are laid aside, that is the scientist's difference between men and women. Women inherit, with instinctive motherhood, a body of passionate interests that men only partially share. And when we say that those interests are needed in government, we but extend to the state as a whole a generalization already applied to every essential part of it. 08449For we freely acknowledge, in the daily progress of our lives, that women's vital intuitive judgments tend often to recall us from our theoretical and commercial vagaries to the chief issue, the conservation of human resources. An extension of than tendency into the sphere of politics will appear less incongruous and more advisable with every year that the profession of politics continues to improve as it is now improving.

Governments are more and more approaching the real concerns of humanity. All those moral and social problems, the preservation of health and safety, the regulation of hours and conditions of labor, the guidance of competition, even the determination of wages and the cure of poverty—problems that used to be handled by a few supernormal individuals under the name of “Charity”—are now creeping into the daily business of bureaus and legislatures. This civilizing of government is a process which we must further with all our might, that ultimately even the greatest questions of democratic equality, which are still only agitated by a handfull of noteworthy idealists, may become the substance of party platforms and the fighting-ground of practical politics.

It is not justice as a theoretical ideal, nor feminine virtue as a cure for politics, but democratic government as the practical method of human happiness that compels our minds. The Anglo-Saxon race has progressed so far as it has, in intellectual and moral and material culture, largely because it has carried forth the great venture of popular government. We have learned to take it for granted, and so to forget, that civil liberty is the foundation of our good fortune, but we ought to remind ourselves of it every morning. We ought to remind ourselves that we are the van of a great exploit. Had we been alive when the daring plans were laid, we should remember. The greatest hypothesis in the history of moral and political science was set up in this laboratory, and our business is to try out the experiment until the last breath of hope is gone out of us.

The democratic hypothesis is that a state is good, not when it conforms to some general eternal ideal of what a 08550state ought to be or do, as the Greeks thought, but when it conforms to the interests of particular concrete individuals—namely, its citizens, all that are in mental and moral health; and that the way to find out their interests is not to sit on a throne or a bench and think about it, but go and ask them. Now to discriminate against an approximate half of the citizens—just because they have, as we say, such different interests from the rest—is to betray our hypothesis and destroy our experiment at its crucial point. For the whole point of it was that we would give up asking an expert political class of the people what the state ought to do, and go down and ask all the people, expert or not and political or not, what they are interested in having it do.

Not only have the thinkers of the world waked up to the fact that women are individuals, and so to be counted under this theory of government, but the world itself has so changed that the practical necessity of applying the theory to them drives itself home. We need but open our minds to the facts. With the advance of industrial art the work of women has gone from the house to the factory and market. Women have followed it there, and there they must do it until this civilization perishes. In 1900, approximately one women in every five in the United States was engaged in gainful employment, and the number is increasing. Most of these women have no choice as to whether they will work or not, and many of them are working in circumstances corruptive of health and motherhood. It is, therefore, a problem vital to the future of the race how to render the condition of industry compatible with the physical and moral health of women. And to him who knows human nature and the deep wisdom of representative government, it is clear that the only first step in solution of that problem is to give to the women themselves the dignity and defence of political recognition.

Compared to the variety of their needs, and the subtlety of the disadvantages under which they enter a competitive system, it is a small thing to give them. But it is the first and manifest thing. It is the ancient antidote of that prejudice 08651which everywhere opposes them, and its smallness is not a reason for withholding, but for bestowing it. Give them that small thing for which Anglo-Saxon men have grovelled, and lied, and slaughtered, and perished, for a thousand years to win—namely, a little bit of the personal sacredness of sovereigns before their ruler and the law. A small thing, but their own, and an indispensable prerequisite and guarantee of every other privilege or opportunity you may hope to confer upon them.

Such is the argument from the ideal of democracy—theoretic, practical, and coercive in the concrete present. Yet, in so far as we are believers in the progressive enrichment of life, we have something more to do than live up to our ideals. We have to illumine and improve them continually. The Athenian youths had a running-match in which they carried torches, and it was no victory to cross the tape with your torch gone out. Such is the race that is set before us. And we may well remember—we in America who scorn the contemplative life—that no amount of strenuousness with the legs will keep a flame burning while you run. You will have to take thought.

And it is out of a thoughtful endeavor, not merely to live up to an ideal of ours, but to develop it greatly, that the suffrage movement derives its chief force. I mean our ideal of woman and motherhood. It is not expected by the best advocates of this change that women will reform politics or purge society of evil, but it is expected, with reasoned and already proved certainly, that political, knowledge and experience will develop women. Political responsibility, the character it demands and the recognition it receives, will alter the nature and function of women in society to the benefit of themselves, and their husbands, and their children, and their homes. Upon that ground they declare that it is of vital importance to the advance of civilized life, not only to give the ballot to those women who want it, but to rouse those women who do not yet know enough to want it, to a better appreciation of the great age in which they live.

The industrial era—for all the ill we say of it, we must 08752say this great good, that it has made possible and inevitable the physical, and social, and moral, and intellectual liberation of women. The simplification of home life through invention and manufacture, the growth of large cities with their popular education, and above all the division of labor, have given her a free place in the active world. This fact is the distinctive feature of these ages. To a distant and universal historian—a historian who writes the lives of the people—that change in the position of women will appear, not only the most striking, but the most excellent achievement of ours. For we will never evolve a heroic race of people on the earth until we give them a twofold inheritance and tradition of active, intelligent virtue. That we have begun to do. And no act at the present time can more urge and certify this great step in the history of life than to give it a political expression and guarantee. Citizenship will rouse and educate women, it will develop our ideal of them; therefore, it is a dominant necessity of advancing civilization that they have it.

That this political reform will have deeper effects than its effect upon politics is proven by the outcries that oppose it; “You are bringing dissension into our homes! You are striking a blow at the family, which is the corner-stone of society!”—Hysterical outcries, I think, from persons whose families are already tottering. Certain it is that many of these corner-stones of society are tottering. And why are they tottering? Because there dwell in them triviality and vacuity. It is these that prepare the way of the devil! Who can think that intellectual divergence, disagreement upon a great public question, could disrupt a family worth holding together? On the contrary, nothing save a community of great interests, agreeing and disagreeing, can revive a fading romance. When we have made matrimony synonymous with a high and equal comradeship, we shall have done the one thing that we can do to rescue those families which are the tottering corner-stones of society. And that we cannot do until men and women are both grown up.

A greater service of the developed woman, however, will be her service in motherhood. For we are in extreme need of mothers that have the wisdom of experience. To hear the sacred office of motherhood advanced as a reason why women should not become public-spirited and active and effective, you would think we had no greater hope for our race and nation than to rear in innocence a generation of grown-up babies. Keep your mothers in a state of invalid remoteness from genuine life, and who is to arm the young with wise virtue? Are their mothers only to suckle them, and then for their education pass them over to some one who knows life? For to educate a child is to lead him out into the world of his experience; it is not to propel him with ignorant admonitions from the door. A million lives wrecked at the off-go can bear witness to the failure of that method. I think that the best thing you could add to the mothers of posterity is a little of the rough sagacity and humor of public affairs.

Once in so often nowadays, somebody rises to say that no woman should be allowed to vote unless she is able and ready to become a soldier or a policeman, and use a gun or a billy upon occasion to preserve order or defend the state. We suddenly learn that only potential fighters are proper citizens, and that the true state is a latent army. “Government is based on force” is the fashionable phrase which seems to be giving very considerable glee to a little coterie of opponents of woman suffrage. “Eliminate from government this element of force,” writes one of them recently to a Boston newspaper, “and its sole excuse for existence is removed. All public functions requiring merely voluntary concerted action of citizens, without force, can be and are performed by private or non-governmental agencies.”

This notion is to most democratic people at this time of day a little surprising. We are accustomed to think that the conception of the state as the voluntary coöperation of the people for promoting their common ends in an efficient and adequate manner, as could not be done individually or by little groups, is the true conception. This would appear to be not only an “excuse” for the existence of the state, but most modern men would certainly agree that it was its real end and definition. That governments require police and military force for various purposes is unquestionable; nobody certainly ever heard of woman suffragists questioning it. Boston has a few thousand policemen; and the United States has perhaps a hundred thousand soldiers, quite enough for every need of its ninety million people. It has many more butchers and bakers, equally indispensable to every people, and rendering services equally necessary to all citizens, men and women, although, in the proper division of labor, the service, like the police service, is the service of men. Neither the one thing nor the other has anything to do with the voting system, or with qualification for voting.

The curious thing is that it is only nowadays and for the sake of opposing woman suffrage that this silly contention has made its appearance. Nobody ever heard eligibility for military service urged as a condition or qualification for man's suffrage. There is no nation on earth where a man is allowed to vote because he can fight, or where he is not allowed to vote because he cannot fight. The mere proposition to subject voting men to such a test or definition would produce a popular outcry about military despotism from the very men now urging the test against women. Yet the only possible excuse or pretext for such a test belonged to the military past, when war was often the regular and almost the chief business of nations. It has no relevancy whatever to the present, when war has long ceased to be that. No contingency is conceivable when even a little of our able-bodied young men would be required for national defence.

If ever such exigencies should arise as once arose at Harlem and Leyden, we have no doubt that the women in the 09055besieged cities of America would do their part as “manfully” as those women in Holland.

I have said that no man ever escaped military service because he was not a voter, or was allowed to vote because he was a soldier. I wonder how many of our people know how many of our soldiers in the Civil War were voters? Out of less than three millions who enlisted, more than two millions were not twenty-one years old; there were about 600,000 voters. The millions were literally “boys” in blue.

There are perhaps twenty-five million women in the United States—over five million of them wage-earning. There are more wage-earning women in this country to-day than there were men, women and children in the day of the Declaration of Independence. What does it mean to say that of the adult population of a country, one moiety furnishes to the prisons ninety-four and one-half per cent of the inmates, and the other moiety five and one-half per cent? What is the meaning of the enormous discrepancy shown by the drink statistics? The prostitutes? Yes; but to the making of one harlot there go, as a minimum, two rakehells. The silly, the common, the frivolous, the selfish, the dishonest, the unscrupulous, the adventuress? All exist and in large numbers. We hope to reduce them. But we think that even there, were statistics available, the feminine hemisphere might be found less heavily shaded than the masculine. We think that that is the opinion of the world.

It would seem that there is an inference to be drawn from two simple facts. First: the militarists, the employer of cheap and of child labor, the bribed politician, the contemner of education, the liquor interest, the brothel interest, every interest that sets its face against reform, from reform of the milk-supply of disarmament of nations, is opposed to the political liberty of women. Second: the biologist, the political economist, the statesman, the sociologist, the eugenist, the physician, the educator, the student, and the moralist, are to be found, in ever-increasing number, advocates of her enfranchisement.

Idaho extended to her women the right to vote in the early days of her statehood. We do not become at all excited over the effect of woman suffrage in our state. But we do declare it to be our deliberate judgment that her presence in politics armed with the power to enforce her demand, has been substantially and distinctively for the benefit of politics and of society. It has aided materially in the securing of better laws along particular lines; especially has it tended to cleaner politics in particular and essential matters. Our women have not always been so active in politics as they should be, but it has been observed that when a moral question is up for consideration, the majority vote of the women has been a power upon the right side.

It is sometimes argued that women will vote largely with their brothers or husbands, but I have observed that there comes a time upon certain question when the brothers and husbands vote with the women. We should not be misled by the idea that the American woman will put aside with entire complacency her views and her convictions upon a large class of questions which are coming more and more to be dealt with in politics. And upon these questions her intuitions are far more valuable than the sometimes sordid judgment of men.

We have in economics what some are pleased to call potential competition. Translating this into a common and homely phrase or sentence, it is the fear of a scoundrel that if the robs the public too severely or too outrageously some one will administer punishment by getting in and establishing an honest business with fair prices, and likely put the unjust one out of business. The trust, therefore, they say, hesitate to put their prices beyond a certain mark for fear of this potential competition.

This element of strength is not to be overlooked in politics in connection with this question which we are now discussing. 09560Women may not always be at the caucuses or they may not always take an active part in as many ways as men. Let us concede that for the sake of argument. There may be very few of them at the state convention, but—I am speaking from observation extending over a number of years and many political gatherings—the women are nevertheless always a powerful factor in every political gathering where platforms are written, issues made and candidates nominated.

Those who expect to win at the polls will never take the chance of the women vote remaining away upon that occasion. They will not do something which they feel would incur the opposition of the women on the theory that they will not go to the polls anyway. They are practically as potential, indeed in some instances more so, than if they were in charge of the convention. I have seen “slates” broken out of absolute regard for or fear of the women vote when there were not two women delegates in the convention among some two hundred.

Some politicians act upon such occasions out of a high regard for the opinion of those whose vote they are considering; others out of fear. But, whatever the cause or the reason, every man who has been in practical politics in a state where women vote knows that what I say is true. The woman vote, as a political potentiality, is a powerful factor at all times in shaping the politics of a state campaign and in determining in some measure, although not to the same extent, the qualities of the candidates. And this factor is always for the good, for whether women may make mistakes or not in the matter of actual voting, men universally accredit to them the aptitude for getting upon the right side of these great moral and quasi-moral questions which are entering more and more into state campaigns.

I read some time ago a leaflet sent out by some good and cultured women presenting a protest against woman suffrage. One of the arguments advanced was that but a small proportion of the women vote in those states where they have been given the right to vote. This, as I have observed the actual practise, is an error. I think a remarkably 09661large proportion of the women vote when you take into consideration, first, that it is a new privilege, against the exercise of which stand the customs and tendencies and teachings from St. Paul to the present day; second, that it is a privilege still rejected and the use of which is still criticised by many good women in the land, which both discourages and discredits its use. If those women who speak disparagingly of the privilege or of those who choose to exercise it should be found defending the right and encouraging the use of it by those who have a chance to use it, there would be little complaint in a few years of the failure to exercise it.

But what shall we say of the thousands of men among the most prosperous citizens of the community who, election after election, fail to vote? It is no unusual thing to find a hundred thousand men absent from the polls in a single state even at a presidential election. Shall we take from the more active, the more patriotic, the right of franchise because the surfeited or business-ridden or politically discontented remain away? I hold it to be the duty of every citizen to take an active interest in politics, to study measures and to vote. Instead of its being an evidence of purity and patriotism to remain out of politics, it is generally an evidence of utter selfishness or political disappointment or an ostentatious display of modern Phariseeism.

The good women surrounded by all the comforts and culture of prosperous and happy homes may feel a reluctance to enter the arena of politics even to the extent of exercising the right of franchise. But the thousands of women who stand alone and must depend upon their own efforts in the struggle for existence; who feel the injustice of laws or the cruelty of politics; the thousands of women who must join with their husbands in seeking homes and educating families, these ought not to be deprived of a voice in selecting those who are to determine politics and make laws.

The next startling argument which those good women advance is that woman suffrage would confuse the functions of men and women and would lay heavy burdens of responsibility upon women which men now chivalrously await an 09762opportunity to assume. It is a little difficult here to determine whether this argument arises out of sympathy for the women or out of a desire to protect the chivalry of men in these modern days. This is the statement, though in a different and more cultured way, which was used in the debates at the country school. The young orator opposing woman suffrage, with a fine sense of the climax so essential in all oratory, reserved until the last the clinching, consternation-spreading argument that if women vote they must work on the roads and go to war.

But truly, “Summer is not so bad as painted.” We find no such evil effects flowing from the exercise of the right of franchise. The functions are not confused—far less confused, indeed, than already in the business world. The mother is no less a mother, the home no less a home, the husband no less a husband, and even often more a husband. It is absurd, perfectly absurd, to suppose that woman will change her sphere in life by reason of an increased opportunity to enlarge and ennoble that peculiar sphere in which she is by nature placed and from which all the laws and politics of the world will never take her. This is the same doctrine that woman has had to meet in every single initiative of her fight for a higher and broader sphere of action. I know,—everybody who thinks knows—that the woman who deals in care and sincerity with those questions which lighten the burdens and adjust the equity of humanity is a noble, stronger, more womanly woman that the woman who sits in enforced idleness, sips her tea and discusses the decline and retirement of some departed social queen.

The suggestion, that, should the ballot be given to women, the less desirable class of women would avail themselves of this right and the desirable remain aloof, is not sustained in practice or experience. The argument having been called to the attention of the public some time ago, a public expression was secured from a number of women in my state. I quote from their published utterances. An elderly lady, long most active in matters connected with the suffrage cause and one of our oldest and most highly respected families, 09863said: “The majority of the women of the state exercise the right of suffrage and it is only on rare occasions that I have heard of the undesirable class voting at all.”

A young lady who has taken a most efficient and active part in state politics for several years, who had to do with the public service, who is familiar with all parts of the state and thoroughly qualified to give an opinion, said: “In my experience of seven years in politics in Idaho, which has taken me over the entire state, I have found the thinking women alive to every issue.” And she added: “I believe there is a class of men who are just as unfit for the ballot as are Hottentots.”

The mother of a fine family, who has been interested in educational work, said: “I do not think it is true that the desirable women do not vote and the undesirable do; emphatically no.” Another, a former regent of our state university, universally respected and loved, with as beautiful a home as may be found in the West, said: “I am sure that the majority of the intelligent women in this state vote. I think the undesirable class vote at times, but never any more as a unit than any other class of women.” I think these expressions convey the opinion of practically all who have observed the effect of woman suffrage in Idaho.

The most startling doctrine, however, comes to me in a bulletin published in Chicago. It asserts that woman suffrage means socialism, and it is part and parcel of the worldwide movement for the overthrow of the present order of civilized society, and the establishment in its place of a revolutionary scheme based upon principles that have been tried and found wanting and which are unalterably opposed to those that form the foundation of the free government under which we live. How it could be effected, what part woman suffrage would have in the movement, is not made clear. This is all left to the imagination, already well aroused and somewhat bewildered by the promised catastrophe.

We can not help recurring to a former argument against woman suffrage so often advanced and which indeed is advanced 09964in this same bullein, to-wit: that she does not want suffrage and would not exercise the right if she had it. Unless woman is going in earnestly and zealously to use this right, to take hold of affairs and exert continuously and persistently this power, it does not seem possible that she would have any considerable part in this revolutionary wreck of things so forcefully described. I do not see how this movement is any kind to socialism or to revolution, unless it is that peaceful revolution by which a large portion of the inteligence and patriotism of the country moves up to a place of influence in accordance wiht every principle of equity and justice. With the corrupt hungry, dissolute mob of political satellites voting in our great cities, bought and delivered like cattle, could we not safely place against this the woman in her home devoted to its preservation against every evil that threatens its existence?”

If these women could see the ease, the imperceptible methods by which a state confers woman suffrage and the people take up the duties under the new regime, the unrevolutionary way in which all things continue to exist, they would at least discard such prophecies as those above. They can go into those states where women vote and have been voting for years, and while they will find good and noble women wheo are not enthusiastic about the privilege or zealous at all times in its use, they will find, on the other hand, thousands of refined, homeloving, family-rearing women who do exercise the right to the advantage of all and in no wise to the detriment of themselves.

Another familiar method of coping with the subject is to ask why women should demean themselves to demand political rights when it is perfectly simple to get anything they want for thee mere asking. Accepting that 10065statement—which is, of course, not in the least borne out by the facts—one might submit that one serious objection to the asking method is that it consumes too much valuable time and takes a women out of her home to much. It takes a great deal of time to seve on committees and plead one's cause beforee legislatures. Secondly, it is not dignified to ask of strange men as favor that which is felt to be the inherent right of any sane adult. To be forced to get by cajolery or personal influence what is in the natural order right is harmful to character. Moreover, the facts do not bear one out that it is as easy to get what one needs by asking as by voting. The women of Australia had sent committees to legislature for years to try to get the wages of the women teachers in the public schools made the same as the men's in the same grades, but it was all without avail. The year after the suffrage was granted to women this bill was passed. To be true, the women of New York have accomplished the same end without the vote, but how many times have they appeared before the legislature without results first? Indeed, we have every reason to believe that the natural way is both quicker and more effective.

One great fear of the adult-suffrage opponents is that the vote unsexes women. Surely those who indulge in so ungrounded a fear may rest easy. Sx is older than our civilization, and the sex of woman is as solidly grounded as that of man. There is no more reasons to fear that a change of method will unsex women that to fear that a man who sews will become a woman. One might as well fear that if a woman votes she will develop a bass voice.

Another superstition that ought to be faced is the one which takes if for granted that women in the mass are supported by men and have no need of representation other than that offered by their natural protectors. As a matter of fact, when Lloyd-George recently raised objection to the conciliation bill granting suffrage to the taxpaying women of England, on the grounds that it would admit only a few well-to-do ladies, it was found on taking the census that eighty-five per cent of the women of England were taxed either as 10166wage-earners or as living on inherited property of their own. It is a matter of statistics that over seven million American women are filling gainful positions, supporting themselves and others. The business and professional woman, writes the director of the Bureau of Municipal Research, has developed as naturally as the great merchant class developed in the Middle Ages or the world-wide industrial classes of the nineteenth century.

If the question is, Are women ready for the suffrage? then no thoughtful person could say anything but “No.” All women are not capable of voting intelligently, nor all men. It may be a long time before the mass of women live down their long ostracism from national interests. But there is one hopeful fact to contemplate in the matter—women are not only by tradition and long training conservative, they are biologically conservative. “If the greater variability of men,” writes Dr. Charles Otto Glaser, of the University of Michigan, “is the gift that fits them to explore new fields, nothing is more certain than that the less erratic organization, both physical and mental, of women fits them for administration, conservation, tradition and culture.” “Society to-day is losing the service of a specialist in these matters,” continues the same writer; “one, too, who is not only endowed by nature, but strengthened by education.” “When once this becomes clear, shall we continue to doubt her ability to breast the waves of jingoism that periodically unsettle our markets and industries, distort the price of living, and even carry us into trivial yet costly war?”

Now do we for an instant believe that men will be the losers when women have wider interests and full lives. One of the sad spectacles of modern life is the broad gulf between the interests and pleasures of the average woman and the average man. Men and women can work together, but they take shockingly little pleasure in one another's society. Husbands and wives, once the accounts and the children are settled, have often not a single subject of mutual interest for refuge. Instead of the emancipation of women resulting in the estrangement of the sexes, as the genial editorial 10267writer quoted above thinks, the community of interests will brighten many a home and supply men and women with many a new bond of communion.

Not alone from our knowledge of women, not merely as a matter of theory, but from the records of history as revealed in the states and commonwealths in which woman suffrage now exists we know that the woman will be guided always in the selection of a public official by the character and the worth of the man. Is he worthy? Is he honest? Can he be depended upon to enforce the laws in behalf of decency and purity and righteousness? Those are the determining considerations in the eyes of a woman. She may have her political affiliations, she may be a Democrat or a Republican or a Socialist, but in any case involving a moral issue, in any case involving the welfare of the child or the home—the foundation corners of the nation—she is above all else the Woman, the Mother. If, therefore, for no other reason than this, we need the woman's ballot, the woman's help. We need the feminine in our electorate. Every man of us who stands for honesty and decency and cleanliness needs the woman to help in the selection of good and worthy men. We need her judgment, her intuitions, her instinct. We cannot hope to attain our ideals without her.

Always the man of America has needed the help of the woman, and he has always had it in every national crisis. In the colonial days, when the fate of the future nation rested upon the grit and endurance and the intelligence of our pioneer ancestors, it was the women who upheld the faith and the courage of the men. They stood by their sides and shared equally with them the dangers and the trials and the hardships of those pregnant days; and in order that the man might have the full help and co-operation of the woman, 10368he placed the musket in her hand, for he realized that he must give her every means at his command, that she might assist him in defending and preserving the home. And when he gave her the musket it was not with any fear that she would not know how to use it. He knew that she would handle it efficiently and heroically, and we know how fully she justified his faith in her.

Now, again, are we come upon pioneer days. We are standing to-day upon the frontier of a new social world, a new democracy, faced with new and menacing problems, with tasks and duties untried and unprecedented, and upon the proper performance of which depends the fate of our Republic. We are not threatened with external enemies—the savage Indian and the wild beast of the forest—but with enemies just as dangerous and for more to be dreaded—the internal foes of the social body, vice, corruption, disease, poverty. And would we succeed in any warfare against these evils we must have the full help and co-operation of the woman, even as our forefathers had the help of the woman in their troublous days. And even as they gave her the musket, the final and most efficient weapon at their command, so today must we give her the best within our gift, in order that she may be fully equipped to stand with us in our mutual struggle in behalf of the nation and the home. If, therefore, it be our wish that we shall endure and prosper we must, of necessity, give her the ballot.

The real question is a practical one. How does woman's suffrage work when tried? In this nation, six States—Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington and California—have granted full suffrage, and in at least the first four of them it has been in existence long enough for substantial results.

One thing is true of all; there has been no organized effort to repeal the grant. Whatever may be isolated opinions, the general mass of the voters are satisfied. Indeed, few have expressed antagonistic views. If the citizens of these states find nothing objectionable in woman's suffrage, a natural conclusion is that no injury has resulted. Especially is this true when the declarations of its friends in its favor are many and strong.

Doubtless some opposition may come from personal ambition defeated by the woman voters. Thus Judge Lindsey, of the Juvenile Court in Denver, who has attracted much attention by his good work in that court, after having been denied a renomination by each of the great political parties, came out as an independent candidate, and was elected mainly, it is said, by the votes of women who appreciated his labors and determined that the young culprits of that city should not be deprived of the benefit of his judgment and experience. It would be strange if the defeated candidates did not feel and express themselves against woman's suffrage. But their complaint is really testimony to its value.

The change in the position of woman in the past fifty years must be noticed. Then the only vocations open to her were teaching and sewing. But within the last half century she has entered into active outdoor life and is not longer a necessary home-body. Not that home has lost its charms, or that it will ever cease to be the place which she most loves and where she reigns supreme, but choice or necessity has driven her into varied pursuit, many of them calling for familiarity with public affairs and executive ability.

You see them not only doing clerical work in offices, but acting as shopgirls in stores, or laborers in a factory. Many who have charge of large administrations, are presidents of colleges, heads of corporations, and indeed engaging in almost every avocation of their brothers, and doing so with success. There is a host of female doctors. Women have invaded the pulpit and are pastors of churches. They are found in the court room, and not a few are efficient and successful practitioners. Indeed, it may truly be affirmed that they have fully entered into the active life of the world.

A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. If American cities have failed in the first, partly because officeholders have carried with them the predatory instinct learned in competitive business, and cannot help “working a good thing” when they have an opportunity, may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities? The men of the city have been carelessly indifferent to much of its civic housekeeping, as they have always been indifferent to the details of the household. They have totally disregarded a candidate's capacity to keep the streets clean, preferring to consider him in relation to the national tariff or to the necessity for increasing the national navy, in a pure spirit of reversion to the traditional type of government, which had to do only with enemies and outsiders.

It is difficult to see what military prowess has to do with the multiform duties which, in a modern city, include the care of parks and libraries, superintendence of markets, sewers and bridges, the inspection of provisions and boilers, and the proper disposal of garbage. It has nothing to do with the building department, which the city maintains that it may see to it that the basements are dry, that the bedrooms are large enough to afford the required cubic feet of air, that the plumbing is sanitary, that the gas pipes do not leak, that the tenement house court is large enough to afford light and ventilation, that the stairways are fireproof. The ability to carry arms has nothing to do with the health department maintained by the city, which provides that children are vaccinated, that contagious diseases are isolated and placarded, that the spread of tuberculosis is curbed, that the water is free from typhoid infection. Certainly the military conception of society is remote from the functions of the 10671school boards, whose concern it is that children are educated, that they are supplied with kindergartens, and are given a decent place in which to play. The very multifariousness and complexity of a city government demand the help of minds accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children, and to responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people.

Because all these things have traditionally been in the hands of women, if they take no part in them now they are not only missing the education which the natural participation in civic life would bring to them, but they are losing what they have always had. From the beginning of tribal life, they have been held responsible for the health of the community, a function which is now represented by the health department. From the days of the cave dwellers, so far as the home was clean and wholesome, it was due to their efforts, which are now represented by the Bureau of tenement house inspection. From the period of the primitive village, the only public sweeping which was performed was what they undertook in their divers dooryards, that which is now represented by the Bureau of street cleaning. Most of the departments in a modern city can be traced to woman's traditional activity; but, in spite of this, so soon as these old affairs were turned over to the city they slipped from woman's hands, apparently because they then became matters for collective action and implied the use of the franchise—because the franchise had in the first instance been given to the man who could fight, because in the beginning he alone could vote who could carry a weapon, it was considered an improper thing for a woman to possess it.

Is it quite public spirited for woman to say, “We will take care of these affairs so long as they stay in our own houses, but if they go outside and concern so many people that they cannot be carried on without the mechanism of the vote, we will drop them; it is true that these activities which women have always had are not at present being carried on very well by the men in most of the great American cities, 10772but, because we do not consider it ‘lady-like’ to vote, we will let them alone?”

We are forever being told that the place of woman is in the home. Well, so be it. But what do we expect of her in the home? Merely to stay in the home is not enough. She is a failure unless she does certain things for the home. She must make the minister, as far as her means allow, to the health and welfare, moral as well as physical, of her family, and especially of her children. She, more than anyone else, is held responsible for what they become.

She is responsible for the cleanliness of her house.

She is responsible for the wholesomeness of the food.

She is responsible for the children's health.

She, above all, is responsible for their morals, for their sense of truth, of honesty and of decency, for what they turn out to be.

It is the general testimony of educators, from President Eliot of Harvard down, that the amount of money appropriated for schools is not nearly as large as it ought to be. Both pupils and teachers suffer from overcrowding, and from the necessity of giving each teacher too many pupils for the best educational results.

What is the reason for this lack of money for the schools? One reason is that the mother and the teachers have no votes. Money can be found for purposes in which voters are interested. Hon. Frederic C. Howe says: “We spend millions for business purposes, for the promotion of industry. And yet, when any organization goes to the city hall for thousand for school purposes, it is met with the response that the city is too poor. We can spend millions for docks, but not thousand for playgrounds.” In New York, it is estimated that there are 80,000 fewer seats in the public schools than there are children of school age. Many children cannot go to school at all, and thousands of others have to be put on “half time.” This is an injustice both to the children and to the teacher. The children get only half the time in school to which they are entitled, and the teacher has her strength worn out by having to teach two relays of children daily.

In Philadelphia, the Superintendent of schools lately called attention to the fact that there were 20,000 fewer seat in the schools than there were children applying for admission; thousand could not get in, and for those who did get in, the accommodations were so poor that children were sitting on broken benches, on boards stretched across the aisles, on window sills and even on the floor. All this was for lack of money. Yet just at this time the city fathers voted $50,000 of public money to entertain the “Elks,” and $10,000 more to entertain the Order of patriotic sons of America. This $60,000 came largely from women's taxes, but the women had no vote as to how it should be spent.

Almost everywhere, the schools are pinched for money; but in the equal suffrage states this is not the case. The Colorado State Superintendent of public instruction said to me, “Some people in Colorado grumble about the size of the School tax, but our schools have money enough.” Gen. Irving Hale of Denver says: “The extension of suffrage to women has made it easier to secure liberal appropriations for education.” Colorado appropriates more money per capita for education than any of the eastern states, which are so much older and richer.

Of the inadequate amount of money provided for school purposes, the women teachers do not get their fair share. In Massachusetts, the average pay of a woman teacher in the public schools is about one-third that of a man. In New York, the richest city in America, the women teachers are paid so poorly that there are hundreds of vacancies in the public schools for which no teachers can be found. The women teachers of New York have for years been using their “indirect influence” to the utmost to secure equal pay for equal work, but without avail. In Wyoming, where women vote, the law provides that women teachers shall receive the same pay as men, when the work done is the same. (Revised Statutes of Wyoming, Section 614.)

The news that Utah had granted women the ballot was quickly followed by the announcement that the Legislature had passed a bill to give women teachers the same pay as man when they held certificates of the same grade. (Revised Statutes of Utah, Section 1853.) The Colorado State Superintendent of public instruction says, “There is no difference made in teachers’ salaries on account of sex.”

President Thomas of Bryn Mawr College says: “Experience proves that women as well as men need the ballot to protect them in their special interest and in their power to gain a livelihood. In Philadelphia no woman teacher receives the same salary as men teachers for the same work, and no women, however successful, are appointed to the best-paid and most influential positions in the schools. What is true of Philadelphia is true in the main, of the public 11176schools in 42 of the United States; but it is not true in the four states where women vote.”

Another bane of the schools, and especially of the women teachers, is the influence of partisan politics. Mrs. Helen L. Grenfell, who served three terms as State Superintendent of public instruction for Colorado, and is highly esteemed by educators there, says:

“After twenty year's experience, I can say that our school boards are absolutely non-political and party affiliation is never considered in the appointment of teachers. I have never heard of a member of a school board being elected because he belonged to this or that party. Generally both parties are represented on the same board. Sometimes a board principally Democratic is found in a Republican community, and vice versa. Our teachers are free to vote according to their now consciences. I have seen or heard of more party politics in school matters in one block in Albany, Buffalo or Philadelphia than on the 103,925 square miles of Colorado soil.”

That the old-fashioned woman needs political power may be a startling idea, but it is just as true as that the new-fashioned woman demands such power as a final step in her gradual emancipation. Those who are able to see the full and true relation of woman to modern economical conditions, and the relation of such conditions to political power and action, very sensibly demand political equality. This demand the old-fashioned woman and the old-fashioned man meet with the dictum “woman cannot be a soldier,” or “I believe in a division of labour between the sexes.” The fact is, however, that the conservative cannot logically insist upon such a division of labour without insisting also upon suffrage for women. This may seem strange and contradictory, but it is nevertheless true.

That politics and law affect every department of woman's activity is fully apparent. That they affect the industrial and business condition under which she works as factory hand, clerk, teacher, lawyer, physician, or business woman, is plainly evident. They affect also her business of house-keeper and home-maker. The girls in the New York shirtwaist makers’ strike of 1910-11 were very vitally and seriously affected by the kind of police-officers and magistrates New York politics had put into or allowed to get into the police administration of the city. They were affected by the attitude taken towards them because they were not men strikers with votes. These girls were affected also by the lack of sufficiently enforced sanitary regulations in the shirtwaist factories. They are vitally concerned besides with the effect of a tariff on hides or of combinations in the manufacture of leather, either of which may affect the quality of the shoes that they can buy for a certain price. The school teachers of Chicago were formerly affected in a decidedly adverse way by a political condition in their city which emphasized the Chicago school system as a menus of selling books, whether good or poor, and of making contracts favourable to business or to politics, instead of emphasizing it as a system of developing the best efficiency, character, and future citizenship in the children of Chicago. These teachers managed, however, to change that lamentable condition, when, led by brave and energetic Margaret Haley, they secured the support of men's labour unions, unions with votes to lend, compelling emphasis to their protests and to their demands for a school administration that emphasizes the welfare of the child, and furthers that they welfare by making his teacher's tenure safe, and by allowing her to use the books with which she can best fulfill her obligation to her pupils. Higher wages, too, and just wages, such as the women teachers of New York, under the leadership of District Superintendent Grace Strachan, have bee contending for in their well-supported and just struggle of four years for equal pay for equal service, often means more contentment, less worry, and better teaching. Can it be possible 11378that the school teacher is unworthy of suffrage? If she is fit to teach, is it possible that she can be unfit to vote? Woman owns property and carries on business. It may fairly be asked whether her sex makes the effect of law and politics upon such property and business, different from their effect upon the property and business of man, or if she is worthy of the trust and responsibility of owning property and managing business, whether she is not entitled to and fully worthy of political power, that will aid her in helping to secure legislation and administration favourable to the protection of or to an increased value of such property, or to prevent legislation and administration that might be injurious to her property or to her business?

“But,” protests the old fashioned woman, “woman's place is in the home; her proper concern is with children, with education, with the happiness and welfare of the family.” This contention of the conservative, upon analysis, reveals a strong argument for suffrage. In apportioning the work of the world to man and the work of the home to woman, the conservative, undoubtedly quite unconsciously, established a very sufficient basis for insistence upon votes for women. For is not the education of children affected by politics through political effects upon school systems, and school administration; is not the sanitation of the neighborhood so affected; are not the prices paid by the housewife and the quality of the things that she buys affected by politics—by tariffs, by industrial combination, by railroad rates, by well-drawn and well-administered food laws or by their lack, by the provisions in her community regulating the price and the quality of light and water? Numerous instances can be cited to show that the progressive man wants more business, and that in his pursuit of business he too often fails to have a due regard for public health; while the progressive woman wants a community fit to live in. Is the woman's aim and desire of less public and social consequence than that of the man, whose mind is necessarily and desirably filled with business? In view of the much proclaimed sacredness and blessedness of the home, ought not its priestess 11479to have political power to protect her sanctum and his, against the overly business inclinations of the man? The conservative talks much of woman as a complement of man. Man is, of course, interested in the home; he usually carries on business largely for the sake of the home. But while man is interested in the home, his more intelligent and alert interest is in business and industry; while the woman's more intelligent and alert interest is in the home and in the way in which business, politics, and law affect the home and the community. The woman, in a word, is specially qualified to represent at the polls the claims of the home to protection and consideration. That woman will immediately work a revolution in politics is neither to be hoped for by the friend of social progress nor to be feared by those apprehensive as to the results of woman suffrage. The rank and file of woman must be given time to get used to the status of full citizenship, to grow up to the sense of responsibility and to the capacity characteristic of their more progressive and intelligent leaders. It is, indeed, a point of strength rather than of weakness in the suffrage movement that so large a number do not seem to want political freedom, for it is undoubtedly true that large numbers of men are not worthy of the ballot. Consequently, it is to be expected, since for the most part only intelligent and progressive women will vote—of course some unintelligent women will be vote by party bosses or by domineering male relatives—that the electorate will be improved in character by the woman voter. At any rate, the home is entitled to its woman representative at the polls. In politics the woman with the vote will be the complement of man.

Two things drive women into business, industry, and the professions—necessity and self-respect. The conservative, notwithstanding, often denies to women outside of the home any right to political power, declaring in justification of his refusal that they are out of their sphere. On the very basis of his contention, however, the conservative, cannot logically deny the ballot to the woman, who, within her so-called sphere, has the too often difficult task of serving as the 11580business manager of the home. Is the income of the factory in money or its output in the commodities of commerce more important than the output of the home ready for use and employment, in the form of utilities making for health, efficiency, and happiness? The business of home-making is undeniably affected by politics, by law, by public regulation of the production and use of the things that satisfy human wants.

All over the world women are managing little workshops where the necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries of life are collected, and often transformed to afford health, efficiency, and happiness to the family. In the home woman is a manufacturer and a business manager. She buys supplies and material; some of these she transforms in her kitchen; she hires help many times; she studies the markets for her supplies; she studies the market for her products; that is, the needs and the desires of her family. Often her money capital is so small as compared with her business that she is obliged to add to her rôle of captain of industry that of general of high finance. She is running a business, this home-maker is. Her husband is only the capitalist who furnishes the money capital for her business. His work is outside of the home. There is another difference, too. The spirit of associations and of combination in the business world is fast making, if it has not already made, the average man a mere cog in a great industrial organization; while, because of the persistence of individualism in home-making, the average woman continues to be an independent producer and business manager, and a business manager, too, whom increasing education—both along general lines and in domestic science and home economics—and an increasing sense of individuality are making more and more effective.

To deny woman the ballot is equivalent either to putting off upon man political duty and obligation not connected with his business of earning money capital for the home, or to denying the home political opportunity to secure law and administration favourable to its interests, and to prevent unfavourable law of administration. Two seeming objections 11681might be raised to this argument. First, it may be asked, have the husband and wife conflicting interests? By no means. But the special work and more intimate interest connected with the work of each, husband and wife, qualify the one to see best and clearest the business interest in politics; quality the other to see the home interest. Social welfare calls for a reconciliation of these two interests. Such reconciliation can be affected by the man and the woman. But, objects our conservative friend, why not one vote rather than two? The answer is easily found. Because there is nothing in the nature of things why the woman should not vote instead of the man, and as yet there is no evidence that man will give up his voting prerogative to woman. In America, at least, there seem to be very strong reasons why many women should vote instead of men; these reasons are that more girls than boys are receiving a liberal education; and in very many instances women have more leisure than men to study public questions. If the conservative objects on the ground that woman's business of home-making is different from man's business of home-making, he puts the granting and with-holding of the suffrage on occupational grounds. In that case the woman wage-earner and the business and professional woman would be rightfully entitled to the ballot. The retort that such women are out of their sphere can be of no force; first, because the conservative has in this case put the ballot on the occupational basis; and secondly, because economic conditions, not woman, are in the main responsible for her presence outside of the home. It is illogical, furthermore, to argue that man should vote as an individual, and the woman, business manager of the home, should vote by proxy through a mere supplier of money capital. Besides, if man's dignity, sense of importance, self-respect, and feeling of individualism are promoted by his right to vote, is it not important that the maker of the home, and the educator of the children of the family should be a voting stockholder in the government, should have her sense of power and of importance added to by being given the right to vote? In the words to Madame 11782Nordica, “Woman, a creature who is entrusted with the bringing up of souls at their most critical and formative period, should certainly be credited with judgment enough to act as an individual.” The second seeming objection adverted to above is that it is a man's business to look out for the welfare of his home and of his family. This is undeniable as far as his business of supplying money capital for the home, and of acting as counsellor to his wife are concerned, but it is a contradiction to say that woman's business is home-making and at the same time to deny her the political power that she needs as home-maker. Such a denial, for example, prevents her and her sister managers of homes from voting against candidates who would, through a tariff, increase their expense of home-making, from voting for a bond issue that is necessary to getting cheap, pure water for their families, or for candidates who will put through a building code that will prevent neighbouring landlords from shutting air and light out of their houses. Furthermore, the best home-making can never be accomplished by a woman who stands in the practical relation of subordinate and employee to her husband; the best home-making calls for a woman with a sense of authority and individuality. In these days, when the business of the home is so vitally affected by the politics and the policies of the community and of the nation, the best home-making calls for the citizen woman. Woman needs political power to protect and further her business of home-making, just as man needs and has political power to protect and further his business of money-making. Division of labour between the sexes in this age is incomplete without full political equality.

The following are a few queries lately addressed by a texas school girl to Ellis Meredith of the Denver election commission, together with her answers. As the are queries which have to be answered again and again in nearly all the states where the women do not vote, The Woman's Journal is glad to publish them.

Q. What have Colorado women and the women in the other states where they vote accomplished?

A. It would take a book to answer. Tracts have been printed from time to time enumerating legislative enactments secured by the women, but these show only a small part of what they have accomplished. It is safe to say that in every state where women have had the vote over at least one legislative assembly, they have modified, changed, amended or enacted laws so that shall better protect women and children. The have made the liquor laws more stringent, and increased the amount of “dry territory.”

In Idaho they have passed a “search and seizure law,” to stop boot-legging; another making saloons outside of an incorporated town illegal, and a third requiring the would-be purchaser in a drug store to subscribe to an before liquor can be supplied him.

In Utah they passed a local option law for cities and towns, the counties to be “dry” unless voted “wet.”

In Colorado, before equal suffrage, there were about ten so-called “dry” towns in the state, most of them dry because the sale of liquor was prohibited by their charters. Now there are twelve counties that are “dry” territory, and 13297five or six where there is but one license. A militant antisuffragette is at present telling the world that Colorado has 24 times as many saloons as Nevada. The truth is that, with nine and a half times the population of Nevada, Colorado has only three times as many saloons. In most of the smaller towns license or no license is the main issue in the annual elections, and the number of dry towns has increased to about 75. The “drys” hope to make some gains at the coming April election.

Nearly, if not all, these states have strict legislation regarding the sale of narcotics, cigarettes and tobacco. This kind of legislation is practically always the result of the work of women, but where they do not have the vote, they find themselves unable to secure the enforcement of laws; indeed, it is not easy to do this even with the ballot, as good men have long ago learned to their sorrow.

Washington, Idaho and Colorado have pure food laws, and regulations providing for the inspection of all places where food is kept.

Utah has a nine-hour day and Washington an eight-hour day for women employees; Colorado had an eight-hour day, which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Several of them, including Colorado, have laws restricting the hours of employment of children.

In Utah and Wyoming, women teachers holding the same grade certificate receive the same salary as men in similar positions. Kindergartens, manual training, instruction in physiology and hygiene, libraries in connection with schools, traveling libraries, compulsory school laws, chairs of domestic economy in state institutions, the medical inspection of school children, with proper treatment for defective sight and hearing, removal of adenoids and the care of the teeth, are among the changes brought about by the votes of women.

Q. Have the women purified politics?

. In some respects. Elections are conducted much more quietly; there is rarely any disorder at the polling places, and conventions are by no means so exciting as 13398formerly. As a rule the nominees are better morally, but it does not follow that they are always more efficient than formerly.

In Colorado the women succeeded in getting the emblems removed from the ballots, and have long prosecuted the fight for the pure Australian ballot, by the which the voter must put his mark opposite each candidate, and can no longer vote a straight ticket by writing a party name at the top of his ballot. Colorado women began working for the Initiative and Referendum 20 years ago, when most of the men knew little about it, and finally secured the passage of this amendment to the constitution and its adoption two years ago. Washington women also won this great reform for that state. The Colorado women have long worked for a primary law; finally one has been passed, and, while it is not all they desired, still it is felt that it is a step in the right direction. The recall and subsequent defeat of Mayor Gill of Seattle was a “reform due to women.”

This however, has really nothing to do with the question of the enfranchisement of women. Unless men were disfranchised, it cannot be expected that women will entirely change the political atmosphere in a few elections. It must be borne in mind that the men outnumber the women in every state in which women vote, and men will do themselves and permit others to do things in a campaign that they would not think of doing at any other time.

Anti-suffragists are circulating a pamphlet by Miss Minnie Bronson, in which she claims that the chief reason why protective legislation for the working woman is adopted is because she lacks the ballot, and that where she has it, “the inference is that she must give as many hours of toil per day as man.” Miss Bronson affirms also that the suffrage 13499states are behind the majority of no-suffrage states in legislation for working women. Let us dissect this audacious assertion.

There are six suffrage state—California, Washington, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. California and Washington have eight-hour laws for women. Miss Bronson says that these were enacted “under male suffrage.” As regards Washington, this statement is directly contrary to fact. Before women got the ballot, the advocates of shorter hours in Washington had tried for eight years to secure an eight-hour law for women without success. After equal suffrage was granted the Legislature promptly passed the bill.

In California, the eight-hour law was passed a short time before the ballot was granted; but, as it was passed by the same Legislature which also passed the woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution by a vote of 33 to 5 in the Senate and 65 to 12 in the Assembly, it certainly does not bear out Miss Bronson's claim that such legislation for the working woman is adopted “above all because she is not herself a law-maker.”

Colorado passed an eight-hour law for women in 1903, but in 1907 it was thrown out by the State Supreme Court as unconstitutional. In the last Colorado Legislature, a more comprehensive eight-hour law for women passed the lower house with only one dissenting vote, but was blocked in the Senate, like almost all other legislation in that year, by the deadlock over the U. S. Senatorship.

Utah adopted a nine-hour law for women in 1911. Mrs. Elizabeth M. Cohen of Salt Lake City, chairman of the Industrial Committee of the State federation of women's clubs, told in The Woman's Journal of May 27, 1911, how the passage of the bill was secured. It was backed by women's organizations with an aggregate membership of 50,000 Mrs. Cohen says:

“The large number of women represented was both inspiring and appalling—inspiring the women's committee to give the best that was in them, and appalling to the legislator who would like to be re-elected two years hence, and 135100realized that 50,000 votes stood back of that representation. His discomfiture was increased by the knowledge that some of his constituents, who were identified with corporations and special interests, would demand an accounting. The power of 50,000 votes prevailed. ... If women had not had the vote we should not have succeeded.”

Idaho and Wyoming as yet lack laws for the protection of women in industry because they have so few women engaged in industry outside their homes. In answer to a complaint from an Eastern anti-suffragists that Idaho had no law limiting factory hours for women, Mrs. Eva Hunt Dockery, for ten years a member of the Legislative committee of the State federation of women's clubs, wrote in The Woman's Journal of Dec. 17, 1910: “Idaho has no factories where women are employed, so the need of this law has not been felt. Up to a very few years ago there was not a department store in the state, and the clerks in the stores were treated as they were in the good old days in the East, like members of the family.” The census of 1900 showed only 59 women in Idaho engaged in factory work, and only 47 in Wyoming, as against 126,093 in Pennsylvania, 143,109 in Massachusetts, amd 230,181 in New York.

Anti -suffragists often charge that the tendency of woman suffrage will be to take women out of the home and put them into industry. As it happens, all the states in which enormous numbers of women are working for wages outside their homes are non-suffrage states. The need of protective legislation for working women, therefore, has not been nearly so urgent in the suffrage states as elsewhere; yet a much larger proportion of the suffrage states have passed eight or nine-hour laws for women than of the non-suffrage states.

They have also done it with more ease. Massachusetts has just secured a 54-hour a week law as the culmination of about 40 years of effort for improved conditions for working women. The Utah women got the nine-hour law from the first Legislature from which they asked it.

The discussion of woman suffrage by the Ohio Fourth Constitutional Convention called forth the following expressions from the Governors of five suffrage states: Denver, Colo., Feb. 19, 1912.

I am glad that Ohio is contemplating adopting a constitution which will give equal suffrage to women. It has been a great success in Colorado; women always will be found upon the moral side of every question. It cannot be that our mothers, sisters and wives would have anything but an elevating influence on government.

John F. Shafroth, Governor.

Boise, Idaho, Feb. 21, 1912.

Am gratified to learn through press reports that Constitutional Convention will submit woman suffrage to vote of people of Ohio, and feel certain the Buckeye State will follow her progressive sister commonwealths in the enfranchisement of her women. All Idaho wishes your cause success, as experience here has justified its wisdom.

James Hawley, Governor.

Cheyenne, Wyo., March 1, 1912.

In this state for many years women have had the right to vote and hold office. I have watched the operation of the law conferring these rights upon women with a great deal of interest, and I have been unable to see any disadvantages or any objection that could be raised against it. We have never had any militant suffragists in this state. Women exercises her rights to vote and hold office as a matter of courses.

We are a new state; in a certain sense a frontier state. I am satisfied that women's influence in political matters has been good. I know it has been a great advantage to 137102woman, as girls in school and in young womanhood make preparation to hold positions of responsibility in civil as well as in official life. Not two per cent of the voters would deprive woman of her rights in this state.

I think that woman has as many inherent rights in a political way as man has, and she is as fully competent to exercise those rights. There is scarcely a man who is deprived of the right to vote and hold office. In this state about the only restrictions upon those who have reached their majority and are citizens, are such as inability to read the Constitution of the United States, being a convict or insane. The same restrictions, and only the same, apply to men and women alike.

Within the last few years I have been more strongly impressed that it is right that women should vote and hold office, because of the fact that many women have come into very important and responsible positions.

Joseph M. Carey, Governor.

Olympia, Wash., Feb. 20, 1912.

During the short time woman suffrage has been in effect in this state, a profound interest has been manifested among all women in the study of civic questions and the promotion of legislation and projects designed to advance the best interest of the people of the state. They are taking their responsibility seriously and providing a powerful agency of progress.

M. E. Hay, Governor.

Sacramento, Cal.

I cannot do better than to say that since the adoption of the Equal Suffrage Amendment in California, three important city elections have been held. One of these city elections, that at Los Angeles, was the most exciting and most bitterly contested ever held in this state, and, it was believed, fraught with the gravest consequences to that community. In these elections, the first test of equal suffrage with us, the women of California acquitted themselves with firmness, courage, ability, and with the very highest intelligence. If 138103these elections are a fair indication of the practical working of equal suffrage, California will never regret the adoption of the amendment. Hiram W. Johnson, Governor.

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, a short time before her death, sent a circular letter, asking whether the results of equal suffrage were good or bad, to all the Episcopal clergymen, and to the Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist and Baptist ministers in the suffrage states; to all the Congregational Sunday school superintendents (the other denominations do not publish the names of the superintendents in their religious year-books), and to the editors of the newspapers. In all, 624 answers were received. Of these, 62 were opposed, 46 in doubt, and 516 in favor.

The replies from the Episcopal clergymen were favorable, more than two to one; those of the Baptist ministers, seven to one; those of the Congregational ministers, about eight to one; of the Methodists, more than ten to one, and of the Presbyterians, more than eleven to one.

Of the Sunday school superintendents, one was opposed and one in doubt; all the rest were favorable.

The editors expressed themselves in favor, more than eight to one.

The ministers and editors are practically unanimous in saying that equal suffrage has made women more intelligent companions for their husband and better able to instruct their children. Almost all are agreed that it has broadened women's minds and led them to take more interest in public questions. A large number say that it has helped to obtain liberal appropriations for school purposes and for humanitarian objects, and has made it harder for notoriously corrupt candidates to be nominated or elected; that equal suffrage does not lead to divorces, and that women enjoy increased influence because of having the ballot. Most of the 139104ministers emphatically deny that immoral women control the elections.

The testimony is practically the same from all four states and from all parts of those states.

“Women in Australian Politics” is the title of a very interesting article by Theresa Hirschl Russell in the Coming Nation of May 25. The author has lately visited the antipodes, and made many interesting observations. She says, in part:

“It is a curious fact that in the United States today arguments for and against woman's enfranchisement still partake so largely of generalities of sentiment and of what Mark Twain calls the ‘easy form of prophecy.’ While we are still engaged in this conflict of abstractions, two English-speaking countries, remote from us in miles, but not in civilization, might furnish the practical demonstration of experience.

Before the suffrage was granted to women the vast majority of requests made by them for the investigation of the conditions of life among women workers—for example, women factory-workers—were treated with polite indifference; now that women have the vote, all of their official requests receive serious consideration. Two women factory inspectors have been appointed, and a special appropriation has been made for the work of an investigating committee.

No one who followed the heated debates aroused by the bills concerning the “Married woman's property act,” the “Extension of the mothers’ rights over their children,” and the “Abolition of the husband's guardianship over his wife,” can doubt the practical advantage that women have gained by having women representatives in Parliament. An article which appeared in the Jus Suffragii while the bills were pending says: “The women members of the Law committee, to which the bills are referred, have had to stand a hard fight. The men members in the committee, of all parties, whether bourgeois of Social Democrat, held that only the ‘women's-rights women’ urged the revision of the marriage laws, and the rest of woman kind was content with the status quo. When this became known, protests came from all sides. Women of all sorts and conditions sent signed petitions to some of the women members of Parliament urging the revision of the marriage laws, and most of the 145110women's associations took up the question and passed resolutions giving moral support to the women members, and urging the point in the bills upon the marriage questions.”

Moreover, the possession of the franchise has been of practical use to women, not only by giving them the possibility or improving the conditions of their work and extending their legal rights, but also by helping them directly to better their economic position. Not long ago a test case was brought up by a woman teacher in one of the high schools, who claimed that as she was doing the same work as the men teachers and had passed the same examination, she should be given the same salary. After a short discussion her request was granted, whereas similar requests made before women had the franchise had not been granted.

Those who advocate woman suffrage are fond of quoting the colonial dictum that taxation without representation is tyranny, and declare that this, one of “the fundamental principles upon which the country was founded,” is shamefully violated under present circumstances as far as women are concerned. Women, they say, are taxed. But women have no votes. Having no votes, they are not represented in the tax-laying body. Hence, they conclude, here is taxation without representation.

Any one who has examined the “argument” critically, and realizes what a total lack of connection there is between the dictum and the interpretation put upon it, is inclined to smile at the display of logic and to dismiss the whole matter as nonsense. But, as undoubtedly many people who have not looked into the question sincerely believe that women have here a real grievance, a few words of explanation may not be superfluous.

The colonists declared that taxation without representation was tyrannical—which is one thing. The suffragists pretend they said that taxation without votes was tyrannical—which is quite another thing. There is nothing unjust in requiring all citizens who can afford it to contribute to the support of the government, whether they vote or not. They get in exchange for their taxes the government's protection to life, liberty and property and all the other benefits of a well-ordered society. The colonist never said or thought that taxation and votes went together and nothing of the kind has ever been attempted. Thousands upon thousands of men, as well as women, in this country are taxed without being able to vote. That is the condition of the residents of the District of Columbia. The property of minors is taxed, yet they have no votes. A man may own taxable property in a dozen different states and yet can vote in only one. Finally the tariff is a tax upon every man, woman and child, citizen and alien alike, in the country.

The truth is, that the phrase “taxation without representation” did not refer to individuals at all, but to the dealings of one commonwealth with another. It did not mean that neither this man or not that woman should be taxed unless he or she were personally represented in the government. The slightest reflection will show the absurdity of such a construction. At most, only those would be personally represented who voted for successful candidates. A man who has not only not voted for those who are elected, and so have power to tax him, but has endeavored to keep them out, cannot be said to be “represented” by them. Yet would any one contend that all adherents of defeated candidates should be absolved from paying taxes because they were not “represented?”

It is now proposed to extend the right not simply to those who have been unjustly excluded it, but practically 157122to double the voting population by including a class which has never exercised the franchise, and of whose qualifications we have no practical knowledge. I look upon the experiment as not without peril. While in the ordinary process of peaceful government no danger may be apprehended, I should fear that in critical moments the generous impulses of women might lead them far astray from the path of safety. Women are far more intense in their convictions than men, and, once an opinion is formed, are prone to overlook the obstacles in the way, the difficulties in bringing about the desired results, or even to give credit to the conscientious convictions of others. As the average man who is defeated in a lawsuit is apt to attribute the outcome either to the bribery of the judge or jury, rather than to the inherent weakness of his case, a woman who is opposed in a favorite scheme or ambition is loth to admit conscientious motives in those who oppose her. Inded, it is a common infirmity of both men and women to have the strongest opinions concerning matters of which we really know the least, and which are the least susceptible of proof. A painful instance of this kind occurred in connection with the anti-canteen law, enacted by Congress a few years ago. Those who were in Washington at the time could not fail to appreciate the fact that the passage of the bill was procured by the efforts of crowds of perfectly respectable, upright and conscientious women, who thronged the halls of the capitol during the debate, practically overawed the members and compelled many of them to vote against their convictions rather than be charged with opposition to the cause of temperance. The consequences are said to be deplorable. Saloons of the lowest class sprang up around the reservations, and if we are to believe the almost universal testimony of army officers, drunkenness increased, arrests increased, desertions increased, though the principle that the United States should no longer be privy to the sale of liquor was fully established.

If I have betrayed an opinion adverse to the bestowal of female suffrage, I am sure it will not be attributed to any opposition to the advancement of the sex in anything that 158123will contribute to the complete rounding out of their lives, or make them more valuable members of the body politic. My fear is that the right to vote will not elevate their character, but will rather minister to a growing desire of the sex to vindicate their rights by competing with men in what has heretofore been regarded as man's peculiar province. My fear is that success in this effort may do much to brush away that bloom of delicacy and refinement which from time immemorial has won the admiration and evoked the chivalry of the stronger sex; that in becoming politicians they will lose something of the instincts of motherhood; that in winning public favor they will leave behind them something of their attachment to the virtues of private life; that contact with coarse men at the polls will familiarize them with the vulgarities of politics; in short, that in becoming more like men they will become less like women. If I oppose woman suffrage it is not so much because I fear their voting as because I fear their not voting, with the result that the intelligent and educated will refrain, and leave their sex to be represented by the lowest class.

The first thought that strikes us in considering the woman-suffrage movement is, that it is a proposition to engage women once more in that “struggle” from which civilization has enabled them in great measure to escape; and that its effect, if long continued and fairly tried, will be to check the development of woman as such, and to bring to bear on her influences of a kind different from those which have been hitherto active. And it becomes an impartial thinker to examine the question more closely, and see whether investigation bears out these impressions or not. We inquire, then, in the first place, Is government a function adapted to the female character, or within the scope of natural powers? We then endeavor to discover whether her occupation of 159124this field of action is calculated to promote the mutual sex interest which has been referred to above, and thus to subserve the natural evolution of humanity.

In endeavoring to answer the first question we are at once met by the undoubted fact that woman is physically incapable of carrying into execution any law she may enact. She cannot, therefore, be called on to serve in any executive capacity where law is to be executed on adults. Now service in the support of laws enacted by those who “rule by the consent of the governed” is a sine qua non of the right to elect governors. It is a common necessity to which all of the male sex are, during most of their lives, liable to be called on to sustain. This consideration alone, it appears to me, puts the propriety of female suffrage out of the question. The situation is such that the sexes cannot take a equal share off governmental responsibilities even it they should desire to do so. Woman suffrage becomes government by women alone on every occasion where a measure is carried by the aid of woman's votes. If such a measure should be obnoxious to a majority of men, they could successfully defy a party composed of a minority of their own sex and a majority of the women. That this would be done there can be no question, for we have a parallel case in the attempt to carry into effect negro suffrage in some parts of the South. We know the history too well. Intimidation, deception, and the manipulation of the count have nullified the negro vote. How many governors, legislatures, and even presidents have attained their positions in violation of the rights of the ballot during the last twenty-years, we may never know. In times of peace and general prosperity these things have excited indignant protest, but nothing more. But when serious issues distract the nation or any part of it, frauds on the ballot and intimidation of voters will be a more serious matter, and will lead to disastrous consequences. We do not want to increase possibilities of such evil portent. Unqualified negro suffrage is, in the writer's estimation, a serious blunder, and woman suffrage would be another. And it is now proposed that we have both combined.

Immunity from service in executing the law would make most women irresponsible voters. But there are other reasons why the questions involved in government are foreign to the thoughts of most women. The characteristics of the female mind have been already described. Most men who have associated much with girls and women remember how many needed lessons they have learned from them in refinement and benevolence; and how they have had, on the other hand, to steel their minds against their aimlessness and pettiness. And from youth to later years they have observed one peculiarity for which no remedy has been yet found, and that is, a pronounced frailty of the rational faculty in thought or action. This characteristic is offset by a strength and elevation of the emotional nature, which shines with inextinguishable luster in the wife and mother. It is to this that man renders the homage of respect, admiration, and such devotion as he is capable of. But are these the qualities for our governors? Men who display personal bias in ever so small a degree, unless accompanied by unusual merits of another kind, are not selected by their fellows for positions of responsibility and trust. Strong understanding, vigorous judgment, and the absence of “fear, favor, and affection,” are what men desire in their governors; for only through minds of that character can justice be obtained.

On account of their stronger sympathies girls always think themselves the moral superiors of boys, who are often singularly devoid of benevolence, especially toward the lower animals. Some women imagine, for this reason, that their entire sex is morally the superior of the male. But a good many women learn to correct this opinion. In departments of morals which depend on the emotional nature, women are the superior; for those which depend on the rational nature, man is the superior. When the balance is struck, I can see no inferiority on either side. But the quality of justice remains with the male. It is on this that men and women must alike depend, and hence it is that women so often prefer to be judged by men rather than by their own sex. They will not gain anything, I believe, by assuming the right of 161126suffrage that they cannot gain without it, and they might meet with serious loss. In serving the principle of “the greatest good of the greatest number,” man is constantly called on to disregard the feelings of particular persons, and even to outrage their dearest ties of home and family. Women cannot do this judicially. After the terrors of the law have done their work, woman steps in and binds up the wounds of the victims, and the world blesses both the avenger and the comforter.

In the practical working of woman suffrage, women would either vote in accordance with views of their husbands and lovers or they would not. Should they do the former habitually, such suffrage becomes a farce, and the only result would be to increase the aggregate number of votes cast. Should women vote in opposition to the men to whom they are bound by ties sentimental or material, unpleasant consequences would sooner or later arise. No man would view with equanimity the spectacle of his wife or daughters nullifying his vote at the polls, or contributing their influence to sustain a policy of government which he should think injurious to his own well-being or that of the community. His purse would be more open to sustain the interests of his own political party, and if he lived in the country he would probably not furnish transportation to the polls for such members of his family as voted against him. He would not probably willingly entertain at his house persons who should be active in obtaining the votes of his wife and daughters against himself; and on the other hand the wife might refuse entertainment to the active agents of the party with which she might not be in sympathy. The unpleasantness in the social circle which comes into view with the advent of woman suffrage is formidable in the extreme, and nothing less than some necessity yet undreamed of should induce us to give entrance to such a disturber of the peace. We need no additional causes of marital infelicity. But we are told by the woman-suffrage advocate that such objections on the part of men are without good reason, and are prejudices which should be set aside. But they cannot 162127be set aside so long as human nature remains what it is. Men may grant women anything but the right to rule them, but there they draw the line. Is it not on questions of rule that the wars of men are mostly fought, and will men yield to the weak what they only yield to irresistible force? In the settlement of all questions by force, women are only in the way.

The effect of sexual discord is bad on both sexes, but has its greatest influence for evil through women. While it does not remove her frailties it suppresses her distinctively feminine virtues. This suppression, continued for a few generations, must end in their greater or less abolition. The lower instincts would remain, the flowers which blossom on that stem would wither. No matter what their intellectuality might be, such women would produce a race of moral barbarians, which would perish ultimately through intestine strife. “The highest interests and pleasures of the male man are bound up in the effective preservation of the domestic affections of his partner. When these traits are weak, he should use every effort of develop them by giving them healthy exercise. As in all evolution, disuse ultimately ends in atrophy, and the atrophy of the affections in woman is a disaster in direct proportion to its extent. It may be replied again that woman suffrage carries with it no such probable result. But I believe that it does, unless the relations of the sexes are to be reversed. But it will be difficult to reduce the male man to the condition of the drone bee (although some men seem willing to fill that role); or of the male spider, who is first a husband and then a meal for his spouse. We have gone too far in the opposite direction for that. It will be easier to produce a reversion to barbarism in both sexes by the loss of their mutual mental hyperæsthesia.

If women would gain anything with the suffrage that they cannot gain without it, one argument would exist in its favor to the many against it; but the cause of women has made great progress without it, and will, I hope, continue to do so. Even in the matter of obtaining greater facilities for 163128divorce from drunken, or insane, or brutal husbands than now exist in many states of the Union, they can compel progress by agitation. A woman's society, with this reform as its object, would obtain definite results. The supposition that woman would improve the price of her labor by legislation is not more reasonable than it is in the case of men, who have to yield to the inexorable law of supply and demand.

When we consider the losses that women would sustain with the suffrage carried into effect bona fide, the reasons in its favor dwindle out of sight. The first effect would be to render marriage more undesirable to women than it is now. A premium would be at once set on unmarried life for women, and the hetæra would become a more important person to herself and to the state, than the wife, because more independent. The number of men and women who would adopt some system of marriage without obligation would greatly increase. Confidence and sympathy between married people would be in many instances impaired; in fact, the first and many other steps would be taken in the process of weakening home affection, and there would follow a corresponding loss of its civilizing influences and a turning backward of the current of moral progress. The intervention of women in public affairs is to be dreaded also by those who desire peace among men. Both women and their male friends resent treatment for them which men would quite disregard as applied to themselves; and woman suffrage would see the introduction of more or less women into public life.

The devotional nature of women must not be left out of the account in considering this question. While this element is of immense value to that sex and to society when expended upon ethical themes, when it is allied to theological issues it becomes an obstruction to progress of the most serious nature. Were woman suffrage granted, theological questions would at once assume a new political importance, and religious liberty and toleration would have to pass through new perils and endure the test of new strains. What 164129the effect would be we cannot foresee, but it could not be good. The priest would acquire a new political importance, and the availability of candidates would be greatly influenced by their church affiliations.

Many objections would be nullified if women should vote under the immediate direction of their responsible male associate, except the one based on their exemption from the execution of the laws; but, should they so vote, woman suffrage becomes a farce, as it is to that extent where it now prevails. The very essential support given by women voters to polygamy in Utah is an illustration of this. In Wyoming men load up wagons with their women to drive them to the polls to vote their own ticket, as I have had the opportunity of seeing in that territory; and so they would do everywhere. If they wished to vote otherwise, they might stay at home; and it is to be expected that women would sometimes wish to vote “otherwise.”

What I have written does not include any reference to supposed inherent right to the suffrage or to any principles of representative government. This is because the view that suffrage is not a right but a privilege appears to the writer to be the most rational one, and because any system of government which tends to disturb the natural relations of the sexes I believe to be most injurious. In the absolute governments of Europe the home is safe whatever else may suffer; but a system which shall tend to the dissolution of the home is more dangerous than any form of absolutism which at the same time respects the social unit.

What America needs is not an extension, but a restriction of the suffrage.

The possibility of extending the suffrage to women must come into serious question. Our voting body is to-day so large, so unwieldy, as to form a serious menace to the institutions 165130of our country. Thoughtful men and women, regarding the situation, cannot but view with apprehension any addition to this well-nigh self-defeating body. Certainly the good possible to accrue to the Nation must be very clearly shown before this step is taken so unprecedented in the history of nations, of precipitating upon the country at large bodies of voters whose legal status is that of dependents.

This brings us to the question of whether the ballot is, per se, a human right. If it is, then it must be granted that there is no reason in logic why it should not be in the hands of women as well as of men. There is, however, no Nation that has not reserved to itself the right to declare who shall exercise its suffrages. The United States government has opened widest this door, but it is a growing question among statesmen, at home as well as abroad, whether it has done wisely in this respect. It must be remembered and can be remembered, too, with pure and partiotic loyalty, that this government is still in an experimental stage. We may believe it the republican idea, the American idea if you prefer so to style it, we may love our country, none the less that we are sorely troubled for her future; we may hope earnestly to see her ride triumphantly into safe harbor, but our faith, our love, our earnest hope cannot establish the success of this experiment if the logic of time shall prove to be against it. There is no argument from the Declaration of Independence to establish the natural right of women to the ballot. This government is not based upon the Declaration of Independence, but upon the Constitution, drawn and adopted by men who establish the government, and this Constitution defines who shall be entitled to vote.

It is claimed for the ballot that it would give to women a sense of responsibility which they do not possess. It is claimed by thoughtful friends, as well as by enemies of the Nation, that a serious defect in American character is the failure to accept and to discharge grave responsibilities in matters of government, as our blood-kin, the English, for instance, accept and discharge such. The sense of responsibility toward the government is not a characteristic of voting 166131American manhood. Why should we be asked to assume that voting will make it a characteristic of American womanhood? The private morality, the character building that must precede all public law-making and sense of responsibility has all along been in the hands of women. How have they accounted for it?

The claim is made that working women in this state are handicapped as wage-earners, because they have not the franchise. If this claim can be substantiated it has a very direct bearing upon the whole question of enfranchising women; but those who make it are not very definite in explaining how this alleged handicap operates.

Certainly it does not operate to close the door of opportunity to women. The industrial field is to-day wide open to them, in this country, and American women have not been slow to enter it.

Several years ago I made a trip to the Orient. The last person I spoke to on American soil was a woman customs inspector, on the wharf at San Francisco. In Yokohama, going into store to make a purchase, I was waited upon by an American woman, and needing a stenographer, in Manila, I secured the services of an American girl who was one of the Court stenographers there.

It would be difficult, indeed, to find any employment in this country into which women may not enter, with no other handicap than their own limitations. We see them working side by side with men, in the arts and in the sciences; practically all the trades are open to them; all the industries; even the suffrage advocates admit that every avenue of employment is free to them.

These avenues, moreover, not as a result of the ballot, or of agitation for the franchise, but in the general course of the world's progress, in which women have had 167132their share, and quite independently of woman's political status.

But the claim is that this handicap operates against women as wage-earners. We are told that they must have the ballot to help them obtain the same pay as men, for equal services. We are not, however, told how the ballot will do this. Nor do the facts, under present circumstances, bear out the claim for it.

For a concrete instance: in the state of California, where, several years ago, a woman suffrage measure was defeated by popular vote, the salaries of women teachers in the public schools are the same as those of men holding similar positions; while in the state of Massachusetts, where women enjoy school suffrage, the women teachers are greatly underpaid, and in no case do they receive the same salaries as are paid to men for the same services.

The ballot is not one of the influences governing wages, either of men or of women. The conditions which regulate women's wages differ in different communities, in obedience to industrial conditions, and the law of supply and demand, In an agricultural state, like California, for instance, or a mining state, like Colorado, or in the great ranging states, like Wyoming and Montana, and others in the West, the men are largely in other than mercantile pursuits. The more usual industrial fields are left more open to women, who are not themselves sufficiently numerous to make competition excessive, and so their wages are higher.

In New York state, on the other hand, and throughout New England, where factories and commercial houses afford occupations to women, there are many applicants for every available position, women crowd the working ranks and wages are brought down. In these older and more crowded communities, too, the competition is greater, of women who need not be wholly self-supporting, and are therefore willing to work for less than a living wage. This is a potent factor in keeping women's wages down, and a factor which the ballot could not change.

Women who have passed the civil service examinations, 168133too, are about as well paid as men in the same positions. In New York City, for instance, the women sanitary inspectors are paid the same salaries as men. Civil service reform is likely to be a good deal better friend to working women than the ballot can ever be.

Men had the ballot for years, during which they strove, ineffectively, to keep wages up. In many cases the working-man's vote was but one more factor in the unscrupulous employer's power over the employe, and the enforced vote of labor kept oppression in power. Organization and co-operation are the means by which working men have been able to raise the scale of wages, and to keep it up; and these are means which women have not yet learned to use.

And how helpless the working man really is when he essays to become a political factor, has been demonstrated to us by the recent terrible object lesson in San Francisco, where a solidly united labor vote, of unquestionably honest working men, put into power men from among the working men's own leaders, who betrayed their constituency, robbed them, and well-nigh wrecked their city's government.

With the best of will to see things bettered, the working men were powerless to control the agents their own votes had elected. They were helpless to bring about a change until there arose in that city an independent leader; a man with no political ambitions, no political affiliations or obligations, whose boast it was that although a native-born American, he had never voted in his life.

We are told that when women can vote we shall have fairer and juster laws for woman's government; but the laws of this state, relating not merely to working women, but to all women, are exceedingly fair, and give women a distinct advantage over men in many ways.

By these laws women are afforded equal protection with men, in their property, and in their lives and liberties. In cases where the law does discriminate, it is in the women's favor. A married woman, for instance, has far freer control over her own property, however acquired, than a married man has over his. Her earnings, if she is a wage-worker, 169134are absolutely and solely her own, and she is under no obligation to provide for her husband as he is to provide for her, even to the extent of paying her alimony if she gets a divorce and re-marries.

A woman in business is exempt from arrest in an action for debt fraudulently contracted, though a man is not. A woman against whom a judgment for debt is obtained enjoys certain exemptions from execution that a man does not enjoy except when he has a family to provide for. There are, moreover, many special statutes designed to benefit and protect women employed in New York, as, for instance, the one which provides that a man may be imprisoned without privilege of bail, and that none of his property is exempt from execution, if he fails to pay the wages of a female employe up to fifty dollars.

We have seen, then, that in this state every field of employment is open to women; we have seen that the scale of women's wages is determined by considerations entirely apart from their political status, and that state legislation has been more than liberal in making laws for the protection and advantage of working women. Women are exempt, moreover, from all of the many personal taxes which are put upon male citizenship, such as the requirement to serve on jury, to help put out fires, to make arrests, to help quell riots, and to bear arms when the country's need requires it.

There are three points of view from which woman today ought to consider herself—as an individual, as a member of a family, as a member of the state. Every woman stands in those three relations to American life. Every woman's duties and rights cluster along those three lines; and any change in woman's status that involves all of them needs to be very carefully considered by every thoughtful woman.

The proposal that women should vote affects each one of these three relations deeply. It is then a propsal that the American woman has been considering for sixty years, without accepting it. Other questions, which have been only individual, as the higher education for such individual women as desire it, or the opening of various trades and professions to such individual women as desire to enter them have not required any such thought or hesitation. They are individual, and individuals have decided on them and accepted them. But this great suffrage question, involving not only the individual, but the family and the state, has hung fire. There are grave objections to woman suffrage on all these three counts. Sixty years of argument and of effort on the part of the suffragists have not in the least changed these arguments, because they rest on the great fundamental facts of human nature and of human government. The suffrage is “a reform against nature” and such reforms are worse than valueless.

Let us take these three points of view singly. Why, in the first place, is the vote a mistake for women as individuals? I will begin discussing that by another question. “How many of you have leisure to spare now, without the vote?” The claims upon a woman's time, in this twentieth century, are greater than ever before. Woman, in her progress, has taken up many important things to deal with, and has already overloaded herself beyond her strength. If she is working-woman, her day is full—fuller than that of a workingman, since she has to attend, in many cases, to home 181146duties or to sewing and mending for herself when her day's toil is over. If she is wife and mother, she has her hands full with the house and the children. If she is a woman of affairs and charities, she was to keep a secretary or call in a stenographer to get through her letters and accounts. Most of the self-supporting women of my acquaintance do not want the ballot. They have no time to think about it. Most of the wives and mothers I know do not want to vote. They are too busy with other burdens. Most of the women of affairs I know do not want to vote. They are doing public work without it better than they could with it, and consider it a burden, not a benefit. The ballot is a duty, a responsibility; and most intelligent, active women to-day believe that it is man's duty and responsibility, and that they are not called to take it up in addition to their own share. The suffragists want the ballot individually. They have a perfect right to want it. They ask no leisure. And if it were only an individual question, then I should say heartily “Let them have it, as individuals, and let us refuse to take it, as individuals, and then the whole matter can be individually settled.” But that is impossible, for there are two other aspects. The suffragists cannot get the vote without forcing it on all the rest of womankind in America; for America means unrestricted manhood suffrage, and an equal suffrage law would mean unrestricted womanhood suffrage, from the college girl to the immigrant woman who cannot read and the negro woman in the cotton-field, and from the leader of society down to the drunken woman in the police court. The individual aspect is only one of the three, and after all, the least important.

For no good woman lives to herself. She has always been part of a family as wife or sister or daughter from the time of Eve. ... The American home is the foundation of American strength and progress. And in the American home woman has her own place and her own duty to the family.

It is an axiom in physics that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. Woman, as an individual, 182147apart from all home ties, can easily enough get into a man's place. There are thousands of women in New York to-day—business women, professional women, working girls, who are almost like men in their daily activity. But nearly all these women marry and leave the man's place for the woman's, after a few years of business life. It is this fact which makes their wages lower than men's, and keeps them from being a highly skilled class. They go back into the home, and take up a woman's duties in the family. If they are wise women, they give up their work; they do not try to be in a man's place and a woman's too. But when they do make this foolish resolve to keep on working the home suffers. There are no children; or the children go untrained; housekeeping is given up for boarding; there is no family atmosphere. The woman's place is vacant—and in a family, that is the most important place of all. The woman, who might be a woman, is half a man instead.

The family demands from a woman her very best. Her highest interests, and her unceasing care, must be in home life, if her home is to be what it ought to be. Here is where the vote for woman comes in as a disturbing factor. The vote is part of man's work. Ballot-box, cartridge box, jury box, sentry box, all go together in his part of life. Woman cannot step in and take the responsibilities and duties of voting without assuming his place very largely. The vote is a symbol of government, and leads at once into the atmosphere of politics; to make herself an intelligent voter (and no other kind is wanted) a woman must study up the subject on which she is to vote and cast her ballot with a personal knowledge of current politics in every detail. She must take it all from her husband, which means that he is thus given two votes instead of one, not equal suffrage, but a double suffrage for the man.

Home is meant to be a restful place, not agitated by the turmoil of outside struggles. It is man's place to support and defend the family, and so to administer the state that the family shall flourish in peace. He is the outside worker. Woman is the one whose place it is to bear and rear the 183148children who shall later be the citizens of the state. As I have shown, she can if she wishes, go into man's place in the world for awhile. But man can never go into hers. (That proves she is superior, by the way.) He cannot create the home. He is too distracted by outside interest, too tired with his own duties, to create an atmosphere of home. The woman who makes the mistake of trying to do his work and hers to, cannot create a home atmosphere, either. She cannot be in two places at once. I have known even one outside charity become so absorbing in its demands on a woman's time and thought that her children felt the difference, and knew and dreaded the day of the monthly meeting, and the incessant call of the telephone. There are certain times in a wife and mother's life, such as children's illnesses, the need fo care for an over-worked husband, the crisis of some temptation or wrong tendency in a child's life, and so on, when all outside interest must abdicate before the family ones, and be shut out for awhile. The vote, which means public life, does not fit into the denial of family life. The woman who is busy training a family is doing her public service in the home. She cannot be expected to be in two places at the same time, doing the work of the states as the man does.

The individualism of woman, in these modern days, is a threat to the family. There is one divorce in America nowadays to every dozens marrages. There are thousands of young women who crowd into factory or mill or office in preference to home duties. There is an impatience of ties and responsibilities, a restlessness, a fever for “living one's own life,” that is unpleasantly noticeable. The desire for the vote is part of this restlessness, this grasping for power that shall have no responsibility except to drop a paper into a ballot box, this ignorant desire to do “the work of the world” instead of one's own appointed work. If women had conquered their own part of life perfectly, one might wish to see them thus leave it and go forth to set the world to rights. But on the contrary, never were domestic conditions so badly attended to. Until woman settles the servant question, how can she ask to run the government?

This brings us to the third point, which is, the effect on the state of a vote for women. Let us keep in mind , always, that in America we cannot argue about municipal suffrage, or taxpaying suffrage, or limited suffrage of any kind—“to one end they must all come” that of unrestricted woman suffrage, white and colored, illiterate and collegebred alike having the ballot. America recognized no other way. Do not get the mistaken idea—which the suffragists cleverly present all the while that the English system of municipal or restricted suffrage, or the Danish system, or any other system, is like ours. It is not . Other countries have restricted forms of suffrage by which individual women can be sorted out, so to speak. But America has equal manhood suffrage ingrained in her very state, in her very law. Once begin to give the suffrage to women, and there is but one end in this country. The question is always with us, “What effect will unrestricted female suffrage have on the state?” We must answer that question or beg the subject.

One thing sure—the women's vote would be an indifferent one. The majority of women do not want to vote—even the suffragists acknowledge that. Therefore, if given the vote, they would not be eager voters. There would be a number of highly enthusiastic suffrage voters—for a whole. But when the coveted privilege became a commonplace, or even an irksome duty, the stay-at-home vote would grow larger and larger. The greatest trouble in politics to-day is the indifferent vote among men. Equal suffrage would add a larger indifferent vote among women.

Then there is the corrupt vote to-day. Among men it is bad enough. But among women it would be much worse. What, for example, would the Tenderloin woman's vote be in New York? for good measures and better city politics? In Denver, it has been found to work just as might be supposed, and in Denver the female ward politics appeared full-fledged in the Shafroth case, in the full swing of bribery and fraud. Unrestricted suffrage must reckon with all kinds of women, you see—and the unscrupulous woman will use her vote for what it is worth and for corrupt ends.

Today, without the vote, the women who are intelligent and interested in public affairs use their ability and influence for good measures. And the indifferent woman does not matter. The unscrupulous woman has no vote. We get the best, and bar out the rest. The state gets all the benefit of its best women, and none of the danger from its worst women. The situation is too beneficial to need any change in the name of progress. We have now two against one, a fine majority, the good men and the good women against the unscrupulous men. Equal suffrage would make it two to two—the good men and the good women against the unscrupulous men and the unscrupulous women—a tie vote between good and evil instead of a safe majority for good.

Then, beside the indifferent vote and the corrupt vote, there would be, in equal suffrage, a well-meaning, unorganized votes—it is run by organized parties. To get results, one vote is absurd. An effectual vote means organization; and organization means primaries and conventions and caucuses and office-holding, and work, and work, and more work. A ballot dropped in a box is not government, or power. This is what men are fighting out in politics, and we women ought to understand their problem. One reason that I, personally—do not want the ballot is that I have been brought up in the middle of politics in a state that is full of them, and I know the labor they entail on public-spirited men. Politics, to me, does not mean unearned power, or the registering of one's opinion on public affairs—it means hard work, incessant organization and combination, continual perseverance against disappointment and betrayal, steadfast effort for small and hard-fought advance. I have seen too many friends and relatives in that battle to want to push any woman into it. And unless one goes into the battle the ballot is of no force. The suffragists do not expect to. They expect and urge—that all that will be necessary will be for each woman to “register her opinion” and cast her ballot and go home.

Where would the state be then—with an indifferent vote, 186151a corrupt vote, and a helpless, unorganized vote, loaded on to its present political difficulties? Where would the state be with a doubled negro vote in the Black Belt? Where would New York and Chicago be with doubled immigrant vote? I have two friends, sisters, one of them living in Utah, the other in Colorado—both suffrage states. The one in Colorado belongs to the indifferent vote. She is too busy to vote, and doesn't believe in it anyhow. The one in Utah goes to the poll regularly, not because she wants to vote, but because as the says “The Mormons vote all their women solidly, and we Gentiles have to vote as a duty—and how we wish we were back again under manhood suffrage.” Is the state benefited by an unwilling electorate such as that?

No one expects woman's suffrage to be refused in any country where popular self-government prevails whenever the majority of women themselves make it clear that they desire to vote. Heretofore the greatest obstacle to woman's suffrage has been the indifference of women themselves. To those who advocate the bestowal of the ballot upon women whether they wish it or not this indifference has been particularly irritating, because they feel that such indifference cannot be overcome until women themselves experience the exhilaration of voting. A news item in the London “Times,” however, indicates that even the experience of dropping ballots into a box does not necessarily convert women to the view that it is their duty to bear the burden of the suffrage. According to this item, the Women's national anti-suffrage league has made a canvass of women who have the franchise in municipal elections. It has inquired of them whether they were in favor of extending their duties to include political franchise. For this purpose, districts were selected representing a variety of population—typical of London, of large provincial cities, of country towns, and of agricultural villages. 187152Of the total number, 2,520 expressed themselves as being in favor of “votes for women,” and 9,845 opposed. The account in the London “Times” does not state the total number of those who were neutral or who failed to answer the inquiries; in North Berks, it reports, however, that out of a municipal electorate of 1,291 women, 1,085 were opposed to the extension of the franchise. In Bristol, out of an electorate of over 7,000, less than 900 were in favor of the suffrage. Almost 2,000, on the other hand, were neutral, over 1,000 did not even reply, and over 3,000 expressed their opposition.

Women have a restricted suffrage in India, in Cape Colony, in Italy, in Austro-Hungary, even in Russia, but in each of these instances it is the woman who holds property who votes because of that property and not the woman who votes because of her need of representation as a woman.

In 1906 the Czar granted adult suffrage for the men and women of Finland over 24 years of age, and in the present Diet of that Province, 26 women are seated out of a total membership of 200; but this Diet is not a representative assembly with the power of taking initiative in legislation, or enforcing legislation. Twice a week for about three months in the year, the members meet to consider laws proposed by 190155the Emperor. The Emperor has veto power on all its acts, and can dissolve the Diet at his will.

Votes for women is apparently not what the French women ask for. In October, 1908, for the first time, women as well as men employed in trade and business had by a new law a vote for the election of “Conseils de Prudhommes” the judge of special commercial courts. The returns show that only 24 per 1,000 women availed themselves of this new privileges. Moreover, this small minority consists entirely of female clerks employed in one on two large banks, whose names in every case had been put down by their employers themselves. Not one single woman engaged in trade had taken the trouble even to enter her name in the registers. The matter is an important one, as all trade disputes are decided by that tribunal. Yet up to date exactly eight women in France have put their names down on the registers out of the thousands who are principals or partners of business of their own in France, where there are probably more trade and industrial undertakings in feminine hands than in any other country. Perhaps that is why they present a sublime indifference to the suffrage.

But what of Norway, Sweden and Denmark—countries more closely allied in institutions to our government? A recent suffrage writer names Norway as a country where women have full suffrage. What are the facts? In June, 1907, the Storthings rejected a bill providing for universal suffrage, but adopted a bill granting women the parliamentary franchise on the same conditions as are prescribed in the case of municipal electors. That is, all women over 25 years of age who pay taxes on an income (they have an income tax in Norway) enjoyed by themselves or husbands, have the vote. Here again we have a property qualification and it is worthy of notice that the population of Norway is one of common origin, a homogeneous people, whose problem is one of emigration rather than of immigration, and that the entire country has a population about one-half that of New York City. A year after this limited parliamentary franchise was granted to women in Norway, a bill was 191156passed providing that wives travelling with their husbands shall be charged only one-half fare. Will our suffrage friends make this as the next move, if once they obtain the ballot here in the United States?

In April, 1908, Denmark gave a communal vote to women, with qualifications similar to those in Norway; that is, “females over 25 years of age, who are tax-payers or the wives of tax-payers, are entitled to vote.” On March 12th last, for the first time, women of Denmark exercised this franchise. A writer in the New York Sun says that “half the city voters in the new franchise are women and they seemed to dominate the election. There were crowds of women around the polling booths before they opened. Shelters were specially provided for children-laden perambulators while the mothers voted. They were largely patronized.”

Queen Louise of Denmark, in addressing the women employees of a great millinery establishment, urged these women to use their right to vote, and said: “When women have secured the suffrage, they should use it.” A claim anti-suffragists have always urged when they were told that only those need use the ballot who wished so to do. Denmark, like Norway, has a homogeneous people, and a government so free from corruption as to amaze visiting Americans. The population of the entire kingdom is less than the population of the city of Paris. Norway and Denmark together scarcely equal the population of New York City and Boston. These comparisons will point the way to a very careful consideration of how far the success of woman suffrage in communities so unlike our own can be taken as a proof that this “revolutionary change” as Mr. Gladstone called full suffrage for women, is desirable in our country.

Many interesting speakers have come to us from England recently; some of them have admitted that woman's condition here without the ballot is so superior to the condition of women in England that were they citizens of this country, they would hesitate to ask for the ballot lest they by so doing exchanged substance for shadow. Many of these speakers, 192157however, urge American women to work for the suffrage because in England women are admitted to all save the Parliamentary franchise; because in Australia women have been recently given the Federal franchise, and in the colonies of the Australian commonwealth for many years had some form of suffrage, albeit usually with a rate-paying qualification. There is little reason why the United States should follow the doubtful action of a remote English colony. There are perhaps a million enfranchised women in the Australian federation; (this includes the women of Victoria, who were empowered in November, 1908, to vote at state elections) this number is not equal to the foreign-born population of the city of New York, while Australia has an area equal to that of the entire United States, leaving out Alaska. Goldwin Smith has called Australia “the paradise of experiment.” This experiment of municipal suffrage for women calls forth no higher praise from one of its staunchest advocates than this: “Neither the fears of its opponents nor the hopes of its friends have been realized; there has been no conspicuous advance traceable to this cause in dealing with such matters as gambling, impurity, intemperance, or Sabbath desecration.”

New Zealand has had woman suffrage now in municipal and general elections for 16 years, and we are told to look at New Zealand if we would see how woman suffrage works, as if Macaulay's New Zealander were already sitting on the ruined arch of London Bridge. Mr. Reeves in 1900 said that woman suffrage had been a negative success in New Zealand, not altering the results of elections; and he also said that he could not imagine woman suffrage operating for good here where we have so large a proportion of illiteracy. In Massachusetts there are 50,000 illiterate men out of 550,000 voters, not quite 9 per cent. The proportion of illiterate women would be as great. But in New Zealand less than 1 per cent of the population is illiterate. New Zealand's distress because of financial difficulties, her loss in population, her many communistic theories, are slow in proving that woman suffrage has been of help in that country. 193158J. Grattan Grey, an inhabitant of Australasia the greater part of his life, and competent to speak of the conditions there, writes as follows of women suffrage in New Zealand: “Not only has it not fulfilled any of the improving and refining services which were claimed for it, when the measure was brought before Parliament, but as an absolute fact, public and political life and the personnel of Parliament itself have degenerated to a most deplorable degree ever since the introduction of female franchise at parliamentary elections in that country.”

Turning to England, we find that no woman has the parliamentary vote and as the scope of parliamentary legislation includes all that is delegated in this country to our state as well as to our national assemblies, plus something of municipal legislation, it will be seen that is left a portion only of municipal suffrage as that term is generally understood here. Municipal suffrage for women as petitioned for in this country is not like municipal suffrage as exercised by women in Great Britain or anywhere else. Mr. Albert Shaw in his volume on Municipal government in Great Britain says: “Every woman who is at the head of a family,—that is, has no husband to act for her, or is at the head of a business, and pays up to prescribed rate of tax,—is given the right to vote for municipal officers and also for parish officers.” Under the local government act of 1894 married as well as single women are allowed to vote for or be chosen as parish counsellors, guardians or district counsellors, or as members of London vestries and district boards, positions practically equivalent to membership on our boards of philanthropy and education. In 1907, the Campbell-Bannerman government by the Woman's qualification act granted the right to serve on all local government bodies to all qualified women, the qualifications being almost the same as for men. Outside of London no married woman—that is, no woman whose husband is living, can vote or served on a town or country council, but in London there is no such disqualification. The London Times, under date of September 6, 1907, fittingly says: “The position of woman and 194159local government was so confusing and illogical that only an expert could distinguish the bodies on which a woman, could sit from those for which she was ineligible; and the voting qualification (which, it is, hoped, will be dealt with in a later bill) is even confusing. Married women may vote for some councils, but not for all, while the qualified widow or spinster, may vote for one and all.” The act of 1997 did not make possible a new and untried experiment, but was passed as the logical simplification of a most confused condition which had become too chaotic to endure. The present law operates to make women poor law guardians, to give them positions dealing with educational matters, and in general to enable them to devote themselves not to men's work but to the occupations for which they are especially fitted, to fill positions which women in our country have held with great benefit to the community, as overseers of the poor, on board of schools, hospitals, libraries and in those larger domesticities which are skin to domestic life. When women of England go beyond this demand the Parliamentary vote, the leading woman of their country, Mrs. Humphry Ward, writes “let us in the name of common sense leave to men the franchise which determines war and peace, diplomacy and finance, and those vast industrial affairs which are exclusively masculine—the franchise which elects President and Congress, and puts a British Prime Minister in power.” That great constructive genius of this generation, Earl Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, heads the movement among English men to keep women from the imperial franchise, and associated with him are Baron Listen, Frederic Harrison, Rudyard Kipling and many others.

Women in American without the ballot are much more widely represented in various bodies appointed by governors and elected by the people than in England. And the laws of this country affecting women and children are far in advance of those in Great Britain. If we are ready to copy England's municipal suffrage for women, are we also prepared to adopt her cumulative vote for school boards, or plural vote whereby owners and, as they call renters in England, “occupiers” are like entitled to from one to six 195160votes apiece of parochial boards according to the value upon which they pay taxes. This brief survey of conditions abroad shows us that under autocratic and monarchial governments women have a restricted franchise; that in the republics of Switzerland and France woman suffrage is a negligible quantity; while in England and her colonies the conditions are so different from ours as to be no safe guide to us in determining the expediency of granting suffrage to women in this country.

Here in New York within a week you have seen sandwich women walking about whose boards declared “In Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado, women vote on equal terms with men; why not in New York?” The answer is not far to seek. For forty years women have had full suffrage in Wyoming. The population of that state is about equal to that of Albany. The laws of these four states are not superior to the laws of the older states where women do not vote. The entire population of that four states is less than the population of the state of Maryland, and about one-third the population of New York city, while the total area of these four states is about eight times the area of New York state. Colorado is the only one of these states where conditions are in any way comparable to those which exist in our more densely populated areas, but so good an authority as the late General W. J. Palmer declared that woman suffrage in his state was a failure and did more harm than good. Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman said to a gathering of college women this winter that woman suffrage where it existed has not purified politics. These four western equal suffrage states are the only states recognized on the suffrage flag. They are “the true states”—stars of yellow on a field of blue. Oregon, in June of 1908, by a decisive majority—twice that of the majority of 1906 refused a constitutional amendment. Twenty-nine counties gave a majority of 21,000 and over against woman suffrage. Four counties (there are 33 counties in the state of Oregon) gave majorities of 7, 18, 31, and 34 in favor of woman suffrage; two of these latter are on the Pacific Ocean; one is in the center of the state; and one borders on the state of Idaho, where women have had full 196161suffrage since 1896. This latter county gave a vote of 31 in favor of woman suffrage, but the two other counties of Oregon which are in physical contact with the woman suffrage experiment in Idaho, gave together a majority of 800 against woman suffrage.

In some states of the Union women have a vote on questions of taxation, that is, women tax-payers have a right to vote upon question submitted to tax-payers.

The only states which has municipal suffrage for women is Kansas, where it was granted in 1887. Repeated attempts to enlarge this municipal suffrage to state and federal suffrage in Kansas have failed. Happy augury for us, if we remember the dictum of Kipling's walking delegate: “What the horses of Kansas think of to-day, the horses of America will think to-morrow an’ I tell you that when the horses of America rise in their might, the day of the oppressor is ended.” Since the legislatures of 1908 and 1909 have convened, the suffragists have been particularly active; yet they have been defeated in Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Iowa, in the latter by a three to one vote. Your Committee on the Judiciary reported eleven to two in favor of the conservative woman, and Massachusetts on a question of submission to the voters of a proposition to strike out the word “male” from the qualification of voters in the Constitution of Massachusetts went on record with the largest majority ever given in that state to a similar proposition, 171 noes to 54 yeas.

In 1838 widows in Kentucky were given the school suffrage. From time to time women in 29 states have been given a vote in the election of school officers. In 1879, after repeated demands for women suffrage, the Massachusetts Legislature granted school suffrage to women. No poll tax is even assessed; a woman who is a citizen of Massachusetts, may merely register and vote. The suffrage leaders said in those days of 1879, “Give us the school suffrage and we will show you that women are in earnest when they ask for the ballot. Women can easily be informed on school matters; the school is an interest near to every woman's heart. We will show you what women can do.” And they have shown 197162what women will do. A partisan or sectarian issue will on occasion bring out the women's vote, but after 30 years from 2 to 3 per cent. of the women who can register and vote for School committee do so. According to the reports of the Election commission of Massachusetts in 1908 there were 180 towns in that Commonwealth where the names of 3,154 women were on the voting list and not one single woman voted on election day. If we add 28 more towns to these 180 and so take 208 towns in our group we have a registration of 6,076 women, and an actual vote cast by women numbering 118. The logic of theory may be on the side of those who ask for the extension of suffrage to women. But the logic of stubborn, cold facts is on the side of those who ask that woman shall not assume the responsibilities of political life.

The problem for solution to-day is the administration of our cities. More than one-quarter of our population lives within these cities. It is in the government of our cities that our political machinery is breaking down under universal manhood suffrage and graft and corruption are creeping in. The education, the training of the present great number of voters, many of them uninformed in our American traditions, is task enough for those who would make our municipalities clean and sound. Any patriotic woman must hesitate before she asks that a body of voters, untrained in matters of politics, unused to habits of thought along business or political lines, shall be added to the already complicated problem which faces those who would make sound our boy politics. American woman to-day, as women of all times have done, set the standards and ideals of society. Out task is before us. The formation of public opinion is in our hands and in the last analysis, we are governed by public opinion. The exceptional woman is more powerful to-day in her civic work because she works without a partisan motive. To admit all women to the franchise would double the number of voters and unless we are prepared to assume that woman has greater political wisdom than man, the result would not benefit the state, while the process would cripple the energies, the activities, and the influence of public-spirited women.

Gift of NAWSA, Nov. 1, 1938 JK1881 .N357 Sec. VII, no. 76 Rare BK Coll.