hich women rear their children, manage their
homes and conduct the larger social affairs outside the boundary
of their home life? I have no disposition to diminish the
Government's recognition of such return, but I wish to remind you
that no one has ever justified the maintenance of public schools,
and an enforced attendance upon them, on the theory that the
Government has a right to compel _men_ to be agreeable husbands
and wise fathers, or that it is responsible for teaching _men_
how to conduct their own business with discretion and judgment.
Quite in another tone is it urged that the schools are the
fountains of the nation's liberties and that a government whose
policy is decided by a majority of the votes cast by its men is
not safe in the hands of uneducated voters. ....It is the
political life of our nation which stands in the sorest need; yet
this is the only department of our national life which rejects
the aid of women.

If intelligence is vital to good citizenship in a republic, it
would seem that, to justify the exclusion of the present
generation of American women, whose intelligence is bought at so
high a price and at the expense of the whole people, there must
be some proof that they have qualities which so vitiate it as to
render it unserviceable. Such proof has never yet been presented.

At the present moment the education and the intellectual culture
of American women has reached a plane where its further
development is a menace, unless it is to be accompanied by the
direct responsibility of its possessors--a responsibility which
in a republic can be felt only by those who participate directly
in the election of public officers and in the shaping of public
policies.

The Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.) considered the Fitness of Women
to Become Citizens from the Standpoint of Moral Development.

Government is not now merely the coarse and clumsy instrument by
which military and police forces are directed; it is the
flexible, changing and delicately adjusted instrument of many and
varied educative, charitable and supervisory functions, and the
tendency to increase the functions of government is a growing
one. Prof. Lester F. Ward says: "Government is becoming more and
more the organ of the social consciousness and more and more