which you men demand that she as a wife and a mother shall care especially for-who, better than she, knows the cruel pressure that comes to that child from too early labor in what the United States census report calls "gainful occupations"?

"But," you may say, "these women are ignorant; how can we afford to allow that ignorant vote to come into the national councils?" Well, you know, after all, ignorance is a relative term, is it not? Certainly this body is too intelligent to think that education in the schools and colleges makes necessarily for intelligence in living. Certainly you recognize that there is a practical wisdom that comes out of the pressure of life, and an educational force in life itself which very often is more efficient than that which comes through textbooks or college.

Forum. 43: 593-602. June, 1910.

Will of the People. Carrie C. Catt.

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 the 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

are 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 years' 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 enfranchised 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 it 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

subjects? 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 a 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

masquerader. 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, or homes for politics. They do not become unsexed and poor imitations of men. There is no increase of divorces, no falling off in the 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 in 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 selfsacrificing 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, wom

en physicians 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 states 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.

North American Review. 193: 60-71. January, 1911.

Is Woman Suffrage Important? Max Eastman.

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 nonsense 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.