not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a
distinctly lowered level.

So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much
a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new
instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.
Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still. She
is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the
conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or
outside of it. In this instinctive desire not to lose ground, to keep
up both with altered social claims of society upon women and with the
improved political equipment of their brothers, is to be found the
economic crux of women's demand for the vote in every country and in
every succeeding decade.

In the course of human development, the gradual process of the
readjustment of human beings to changed social and economic conditions
is marked at intervals by crises wherein the struggle always going on
beneath the surface between the new forces and existing conditions
wells up to the surface and takes on the nature of a duel between
contending champions. If this is true of one class or of one people,
how much more is it true when the change is one that affects an entire
sex.

There have been occasions in history and there occur still today
instances when economic conditions being such that their labor was
urgently needed and therefore desired, it was easy for newcomers to
enter a fresh field of industry, and give to a whole class or even
to a whole sex in one locality an additional occupation. Such very
evidently was the case with the first girls who went into the New
England cotton mills. Men's occupations at that time in America lay
for the most part out of doors, and there was therefore no sense of
rivalry experienced, when the girls who used to spin at home began to
spin on a large scale and in great numbers in a factory.

It is far different where women have been forced by the economic
forces driving them from behind to make their slow and painful way
into a trade already in the possession of men. Of course the wise
thing for the men to do in such a case is to bow to the logic of
events, and through their own advantageous position as first in the
field and through whatever organizations they may possess use all
their power to place their new women rivals on an equal footing
with themselves and so make it impossible for the women to becom