wage-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 matterwomen 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

writer quoted above thinks, the community of interests will brighten many a home and supply men and women with many a new bond of communion.

Man Needs Woman's Ballot.

Clifford Howard.

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,

he 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 far 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.

Summing Up the Case for Woman Suffrage.

Justice David J. Brewer, of the U. S. Supreme Court.

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 Californiahave 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 no 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 pursuits, 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.

Women and Public Housekeeping.

Jane Addams.

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