ms bearers (all men must serve in the army).[56]

In Cape Colony similar conditions prevail. The Women's Enfranchisement
League was formed in 1907; and in July, 1907, there took place the first
woman's suffrage debate in Parliament. The woman's suffrage societies of
Natal, Cape Colony, and the Transvaal have formed an association and have
joined the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance. In Natal and Cape
Colony women taxpayers exercise the right to vote in municipal affairs.
The regulation of the suffrage qualifications for the Federal Parliament
is being considered. The South African delegates in London (1909)
expressed the fear that women would not be given the federal suffrage.

THE SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES

_Sweden_
Total population: 5,377,713.
Women: 2,751,257.
Men: 2,626,456.

_Finland_
Total population: 2,712,562.
Women: 1,370,480.
Men: 1,342,082.

_Norway_
Total population: 2,240,860.
Women: 1,155,169.
Men: 1,085,691.

_Denmark_
Total population: 2,588,919.
Women: 1,331,154.
Men: 1,257,765.

Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark will be grouped together since they
are so closely connected by race and culture; repetition will thereby be
avoided, and clearness promoted.

All four countries have the advantage of having a population largely
agricultural,--a population scattered in small groups. Clearly, the
problem of dealing with congested masses of people is here absent.
Everywhere there is an eagerness for education. The educational average is
high. The position of woman is one of freedom, for here have been kept
alive the old Germanic traditions which we [the Germans] know only from
reading Caesar or Tacitus. An external factor in hastening the solution of
the question of woman's rights was the very unusual numerical superiority
of women. The foreign wars, which took the majority of the men away from
home for long periods of time,--first in the Middle Ages, and then again
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,--and the fact that the
Scandinavian countries themselves were afflicted with wars only to a small
extent, explain the freedom of the Scandinavian women. Like the English
women, they had for centuries not known the significance of war for woman.
In the absence of the men, women continued the transaction of business and
industrial ente