dice which 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 democracytheoretic, 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 certainty, 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

say 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 grown up.

are both

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.

Woman's Journal. 43: 58. February 24, 1912.

Suffrage and Soldiering. Edwin D. Mead.

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 Neither the one thing nor the other has anything to do with the voting system, or with qualification for voting.

men.

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 tithe of our ablebodied 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

besieged 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.

Voting and Fighting.

It is said that, if women vote, they ought to fight and do police duty.

If no men were allowed to vote except those who are able and willing to do military and police duty, women might consistently be debarred for that reason. But so long as the old, the infirm, the halt, the lame and the blind are freely admitted to the ballot box, some better reason must be found for excluding women than the fact that they do not fight.

By a comic fatality,this objection is almost always urged by some man who could not fight himself-some peaceful, venerable old clergyman, or some corpulent, elderly physician who would expire under a forced march of five miles. I have even heard it used by a man who had been stone blind ever since he was three years old.

It is said that we have to legislate for classes, not for individuals; and that men as a class can fight, while women can not. But there are large classes of men who are regarded as disqualified to fight, and are exempt from military service, yet they vote. All men over 45 years of age are exempt. So are all who are not physically robust. Of the young men who volunteered for the Spanish war, more than half were rejected as unfit for military service. Col. T. W. Higginson says:

"It appears by the record of United States military statis