eir own interests, but at the same time their very entrance
into government increased the volume and pressure of those interests.

Much of the new demand for political enfranchisement arises from a
desire to remedy the unsatisfactory and degrading social conditions
which are responsible for so much wrongdoing and wretchedness. The fate
of all the unfortunate, the suffering, the criminal, is daily forced
upon public attention in painful and intimate ways. But because of the
tendency to nationalize all industrial and commercial questions, to
make the state responsible for the care of the helpless, to safeguard
by law the food we eat and the liquid we drink, to subordinate the
claim of the individual family to the health and well-being of the
community, contemporary women who are without the franchise are much
more outside the real life of the world than any set of disenfranchised
men could possibly have been in all history, unless it were the men
slaves of ancient Greece, because never before has so large an area of
life found civic expression, never has Hegel's definition of the state
been so accurate, that it is the "realization of the moral ideal."
Certain it is that the phenomenal entrance of women into governmental
responsibility in the dawn of the twentieth century is coincident with
the consideration by governmental bodies of the basic human interests
with which women have been traditionally concerned. A most advanced
German statesman recently declared in the Reichstag that it was a
reproach to the Imperial Government itself that out of two million
children born annually in Germany, 400,000 died during the first twelve
months of their existence. He proceeded to catalog various reforms
which might remedy this, such as better housing, the increase of park
areas, the erection of municipal hospitals, the provision for an
adequate milk supply, and many another, but he did not make the very
obvious suggestion that women might be of service in a situation
involving the care of children less than a year old.

Nevertheless, in spite of this lack of perception, women all over the
world are claiming and receiving a place in representative government
because they insist that they will not cease to perform their
traditional duties, simply because these duties have been taken over by
existing governments.

The contemporaneous "Votes for Women" movement is often amorphous and
sporadic, but always spontaneous. It not only appear