t
present. Now that these subjects are being brought into the political
field, women should follow them there, as they have followed their
industries from the homes into the factories. There is no reason to
believe that their judgments will be less sound than those of their
brothers and husbands.

Of course, women's knowledge of means and methods is much less than that
of men in their own class. Not only have they not participated in
political life, but they have been steadily warned away from that
particular tree of knowledge. Yet the present generation of women has
gone through the same preliminary education in schools with its
brothers; and many women in high schools and colleges have made a more
extended study of political institutionalism. Still more important, more
than a million women have been educating themselves for some years in
this direction through voluntary associations of some kind; while in
most States they have had some political practice through limited
suffrage, and in a few States full experience.

In selecting representatives to carry out their will, women have certain
obvious defects of temperament and training. Having been brought up for
generations to judge men only as providers of sustenance and fathers of
children, they must at first find it difficult to consider candidates
impersonally. Still, their general morality and their standards of right
are probably superior to those of men, and they are more intolerant of
faults, and they find it harder to compromise on matters of character
than do men. One can hardly believe that 1,700 women could be found
among the respectable, church-going, American-born residents in any
county of America, who would sell their votes, year after year, as that
number of men voters has recently confessed to doing in Adams County,
Ohio. In fact, Judge Blair says: "There was one class of the population
which rebelled against the practice. It was the womanhood of Adams
County, which had never become reconciled to the custom, and whose
continual hostility has resulted finally, I hope, in its
abolishment."[46]

[46] Seventeen Hundred Rural Vote-Sellers, by A.Z. Blair, _McClure's
Magazine_, November, 1911.

Of the need of women for the training which participation in political
life gives there can be no doubt. Their lives have always been directly
dependent upon other individuals, and they are prone to think in small
details. Any training which extends the horizon of