man and not man for the sake of the law. Liberate self-hood, therefore; perhaps socially care for motherhood; certainly study eugenics and see what good gift it may have to give us. Say what one will, it is voting secondarily as means, these things primarily as end, that are the kernel and soul and star of the new woman's movement of our new day.

And these things are no mere dreams. They are the quickening embryo of our social future. But we must not only trust the creative forces of nature, we must put the best science of the age at the disposal of individual men and women. We must use the wonderful machinery of modern civilization for enlightening and not for exploiting the individual. Then there will be some basis for believing in the final balance of the best. What is it that will pay the best in the long run? Three things surely: freedom, sincerity, and social-mindedness. Sincerity (of freedom we have just spoken) is the engendering germ of the true democracy in which everybody rubs against everybody else. So far we have only a hesitating republic of the spirit, a precarious interstitial growth where our institutions are lax at the joint. But with the impending woman, we are to have a psychological, if not even a biological, democracy in which for the first time selfhood cannot be sold, but the philoprogenitive proclivities can take their place, along with other riches, among the spiritual possessions of the race.

We are too tragically trying to reform the wrong things, giving superficial palliatives for a social difficulty that is calling for radical surgery. If woman uses her birthright to hasten some form of socialism, let it come. Man has not made such a success of the present system that he can afford to complain. It is woman's innings—and it may yet be that her first and her finest act in her power will be her generosity to man. What greater triumph of human culture than the moment when it ceases to be a physical and economic, or social strife between men and women, and turns to the heightened harmony of an intercurrent selfhood?

We shall have to trust life to further life. We shall have to let life be the criterion of life. We shall have to square our codes by our needs and not our needs by our codes. The aim of

civilization is to evolve a free personality, not an institution, for institution is but a name for a trend among persons.

But we

Such is the essence of the new woman movement. may not forget that woman's conquest of freedom gives of itself no adequate content to her life. Hence she cannot afford, in ruthless iconoclasm, to squander her historic assets. She will find it well, along with the new ideal, to conserve and unify and exalt those ideals which the wise old world has worked out through so many centuries: the primitive ideal of secularity, but without the old servitude; the Greek ideal of sensuous beauty, but without vanity and vice; the old Church idea of spiritual beauty, but without the asceticism of the nun, and without a conventional, feigned, low estimate of the sensuous; finally, the Protestant ideal of wifehood and motherhood, yet a larger and loftier wifehood and motherhood than the former private and narrow domesticity aspired to. It is increasingly evident to-day that woman's motherly impulses have deepened and widened until she means to be not simply the mother of the individual, but of society, of the state with its man-made institutions, aye, of art and science, of religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual, personal and social, needs to be mothered. "Eve was the mother of all living," says the old profound legend in the book of Genesis. And if we are to have a brotherhood and solidarity of nations, instead of atomistic and exclusive peoples, shall we not yet have a motherhood of one human home, instead of a petty and particular motherhood of egotistic centres of existence?

To be sure, objections bristle. One or two of these we may examine. The most common and effective is that in the possession of these new rights woman ceases to be womanly. The usual answer by which this objection is supposed to be met is, if possible, worse than the objection itself. "There is an upper zone," so the usual answer runs, "where we are neither male nor female, but just human; and woman wants the suffrage, for instance, not as woman but as human." But there is no such upper zone as this. There is no super-sexual humanness. There is no super-feminine womanness. There is no such thing as a human nature that is neither male nor female. The psychological

and physiological are organically related and correlated, and sexual difference in the latter involves sexual difference in the former. Sex extends to the very core of spiritual personality. An old monk, at the time of the controversy over nominalism and realism, was so sure that the universal, rather than the particular, was the real, that he said he was not going to eat apples and peaches and pears and the like, any more, but just fruit! But as there is no fruit that is apple-less and peach-less and pearless, thus there is no human nature that is man-less or womanless.

Instead, therefore, of wanting the woman to vote because she is somewhere in her mystic being not woman, but man, the state needs her vote precisely because she is a woman and not a man. If she vote because, in voting, she is manlike, she would but double the present number of incompetent male votes without altering the quality of civic life. But if she vote as what she is, a woman, she brings new content and new quality and new value to our present abridged and impoverished civic existence. Woman is to be a free self, but it is a woman's self that she is to be. And as to her ceasing to be a woman when she comes to be a citizen, that notion is absurd, since she was a woman in the old matriarchy, and since there is nothing in the franchise that can eliminate the constitutional femininity of her

nature.

The only other objection of which this article shall take note was referred to in the indictment already mentioned. "Why cannot woman be satisfied with her present position which her present rights assign her? Do not the men see to her safety and comfort?" But her present right was donated and dictated to her, not created and achieved by her. She was granted just the measure of freedom that man considered desirable for her on his account. Man created right-changed, limited, extended right-interpreted and applied right to woman. But woman, to be a self, must participate in the formation of her rights. And as to woman's comfort and safety, these cannot take the place of freedom! Even poodles are comfortable and safe, contented and happy; but they are not free, and have no dream of freedom. Trouble, and struggle, and sorrow, nay, danger and loss

and the risk of ruin for woman, as for man, with freedom, are far better and nobler than imperturbability and repose and protection without freedom. The point is that woman can no longer allow any sort of disqualification or disability that is contrary to selfhood. The point is that the free unfolding of personality is the most necessary thing that there is in the world for either

man or woman.

This, then, is woman's primary right-full majority and self-accountability; full freedom to test her strength as woman and to bring her feminine individuality to supreme and perfect unfolding. And it follows that woman's main significance and service is in her unlikeness to man, in her peculiarity: not in her logic, no matter how high a pitch she may yet reach in this direction; not in her business ability, however great the efficiency she may yet develop. The new path of woman is the path of freedom and independence. This path does not lead back into the cloister, not back into the home necessarily, not necessarily into marriage even, but into the heart, into the deep of the human spirit, from which all that is good and great for the woman in every situation of life is born. And if life has gained infinitely by the liberation and elevation of the masculine half of our humanity, how much more will life be enriched when all the seed and endowments of the other and better half shall have enjoyed a like happy and powerful growth!

T

A Humbug

JAMES DAVID KENNY

HE story of Ireland in the last seven hundred years is the most ghastly and terrible one recorded in the pages

of history, and yet few take Irish questions seriously, at first glance. So much is this so that most people who take the trouble to read the current reports of events in Ireland, even Irishmen themselves, are not quite sure whether the present difficulty in Ulster is a serious political fact or a mere joke.

Having found, after some special investigation, that there is now no real Nationalism among the Irish in Ireland, or outside of it, so far as I could observe, I thought when I heard of the Covenant entered into by those recalcitrants in the north of Ireland that they at least, out of all the rest of the people of the country, were in earnest, and meant what they said. I wanted to believe that there was sincerity somewhere in Ireland. changed my mind when I read the Covenant itself.

I

It begins this way: BEING CONVINCED IN OUR CON

SCIENCES THAT HOME RULE WOULD BE DISASTROUS TO THE MATERIAL WELL-BEING OFf ulster, as well as of THE WHOLE OF IRELAND," Here is an express declaration of belief, upon the consciences of the covenanters, that the proposed parliament in Dublin would do material injury to Ulster, and to all Ireland. Let us put the direct question: How?, and try to answer it.

The material disaster anticipated would have to express itself in one of two ways, or in both, to do any damage to anyone in the country. First, an Irish Parliament might operate injuriously against those who own land; or second, it might mulct those dependent upon manufacturing enterprises, trade or commerce for a livelihood, or a fortune.

Now what does the Government of Ireland Bill say in regard to the first of those interests-the land?

This is what it says: "The Irish Parliament shall not have