of this statement
instances are cited of women letting their vote lie idle and unimproved
in elections for school trustee and alderman. Of course, the
percentage of men voting in these contests was quite small, too, but no
person finds fault with that.

Women may have been careless about their franchise in elections where
no great issue is at stake, but when moral matters are being decided
women have not shown any lack of interest. As a result of the first
vote cast by the women of Illinois over one thousand saloons went out
of business. Ask the liquor dealers if they think women will use the
ballot. They do not object to woman suffrage on the ground that women
will not vote, but because they will.

"Why, Uncle Henry!" exclaimed one man to another on election day. "I
never saw you out to vote before. What struck you?"

"Hadn't voted for fifteen years," declared Uncle Henry, "but you bet I
came out today to vote against givin' these fool women a vote; what's
the good of givin' them a vote? they wouldn't use it!"

Then, of course, on the other hand there are those who claim that women
would vote too much--that they would vote not wisely but too well; that
they would take up voting as a life work to the exclusion of husband,
home and children. There seems to be considerable misapprehension on
the subject of voting. It is really a simple and perfectly innocent
performance, quickly over, and with no bad after-effects.

It is usually done in a vacant room in a school or the vestry of a
church, or a town hall. No drunken men stare at you. You are not
jostled or pushed--you wait your turn in an orderly line, much as you
have waited to buy a ticket at a railway station. Two tame and
quiet-looking men sit at a table, and when your turn comes, they ask
you your name, which is perhaps slightly embarrassing, but it is not as
bad as it might be, for they do not ask your age, or of what disease
did your grandmother die. You go behind the screen with your ballot
paper in your hand, and there you find a seal-brown pencil tied with a
chaste white string. Even the temptation of annexing the pencil is
removed from your frail humanity. You mark your ballot, and drop it in
the box, and come out into the sunlight again. If you had never heard
that you had done an unladylike thing you would not know it. It all
felt solemn, and serious, and very respectable to you, something like a
Sunday-school convention. Then, too, you