ing, her sphere of sympathetic and
self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives. If the service
of women is not won to such governmental action (not only through
"influence or the shaping of public opinion," but through
definite and authoritative exercise), the mother-office of the
State, now so widely adopted, will be too often planned and
administered as though it were an external, mechanical and
abstract function, instead of the personal, organic and practical
service which all right helping of individuals must be.

In so far as motherhood has given to women a distinctive ethical
development, it is that of sympathetic personal insight
respecting the needs of the weak and helpless, and of
quick-witted, flexible adjustment of means to ends in the
physical, mental and moral training of the undeveloped. And thus
far has motherhood fitted women to give a service to the modern
State which men can not altogether duplicate....

Whatever problems might have been involved in the question of
woman's place in the State when government was purely military,
legal and punitive have long since been antedated. Whatever
problems might have inhered in that question when women were
personally subject to their families or their husbands are
well-nigh outgrown in all civilized countries, and entirely so in
the most advanced. Woman's nonentity in the political department
of the State is now an anachronism and inconsistent with the
prevailing tendencies of social growth....

The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative
expression of the feminine as well as the masculine
interpretation of that common social consciousness which is
slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social
order.

Miss Laura Clay (Ky.) illustrated the Fitness of Women to Become
Citizens from the Standpoint of Physical Development.

Among the objections brought against the extension of suffrage to
women, that of their physical unfitness to perform military
duties is the most plausible, because in the popular mind there
is an idea that the right of casting a ballot is in its final
analysis dependent upon the ability to defend it with a
bullet....

It is by no means self-evident that women are naturally unfitted
for fighting or are unwarlike in dis