of trickery?

Women are too sentimental to vote, say the politicians sometimes.
Sentiment is nothing to be ashamed of, and perhaps an infusion of
sentiment in politics is what we need. Honor and honesty, love and
loyalty, are only sentiments, and yet they make the fabric out of which
our finest traditions are woven. The United States has sent carloads
of flour to starving Belgium because of a sentiment. Belgium refused
to let Germany march over her land because of a sentiment, and Canada
has responded to the SOS call of the Empire because of a sentiment. It
seems that it is sentiment which redeems our lives from sordidness and
selfishness, and occasionally gives us a glimpse of the upper country.

For too long people have regarded politics as a scheme whereby easy
money might be obtained. Politics has meant favors, pulls, easy jobs
for friends, new telephone lines, ditches. The question has not been:
"What can I do for my country?" but: "What can I get? What is there in
this for me?" The test of a member of Parliament as voiced by his
constituents has been: "What has he got for us?" The good member who
will be elected the next time is the one who did not forget his
friends, who got us a Normal School, or a Court House, or an
Institution for the Blind, something that we could see or touch, eat or
drink. Surely a touch of sentiment in politics would do no harm.

Then there is the problem of the foreign woman's vote. Many people
fear that the granting of woman suffrage would greatly increase the
unintelligent vote, because the foreign women would then have the
franchise, and in our blind egotism we class our foreign people as
ignorant people, if they do not know our ways and our language. They
may know many other languages, but if they have not yet mastered ours
they are poor, ignorant foreigners. We Anglo-Saxon people have a
decided sense of our own superiority, and we feel sure that our skin is
exactly the right color, and we people from Huron and Bruce feel sure
that we were born in the right place, too. So we naturally look down
upon those who happen to be of a different race and tongue than our own.

It is a sad feature of humanity that we are disposed to hate what we do
not understand; we naturally suspect and distrust where we do not know.
Hens are like that, too! When a strange fowl comes into a farmyard all
the hens take a pick at it--not that it has done anything wrong, but
they just naturally d