their interests and
enables them to deal more largely with these details will fit them
better for living in a world where industrial, business and social
changes are so rapidly merging details in larger wholes. Experience in
selecting candidates for public office would also do much to broaden
women's judgments of life, and would help to break down the pettiness
which sometimes characterizes their personal relations.

In the case of women, the community has a double reason for desiring
that they shall develop political judgments and become acquainted with
political methods. It is not only that they may share in the general
intelligence and carry their fair part of the political burdens; but
they have become the teachers, both in homes and schools, of the
oncoming generation of male voters. We no longer live in small
communities where children can see the simple processes of government
operating around them, but in a complex civilization where it must all
be interpreted to them, and mainly by women. Many boys who complete our
elementary schools never work a day under the direction of a man. In the
homes, busy fathers increasingly turn over the training of children to
their wives. How can these women train safe citizens for the future if
they do not understand the processes involved well enough to use them
themselves?

Meantime the old arguments against woman suffrage are too outworn to
need serious attention. In the past decades our civilization has become
so complex, with so many groups carrying on differentiated functions,
that even if we had not the millions of educated, property-owning,
wage-earning, voting women that now fill our public life, the old
arguments would still be obsolete. The issues of life are no longer
primarily military, and but a fraction of men voters is capable of
meeting modern requirements as policemen and soldiers; in time of
crisis, all men would be called into the reserves; but in such periods
women have always fought in the breach, from Carthage to Paris. Still,
in modern warfare, those who guard the rear and furnish supplies are as
necessary as those who go to the front.

It has also long been recognized that women who rear finest sons and
daughters must sometimes turn away from the cradle to refresh their
lives with the touch of other interests. It has also been demonstrated a
thousand times over that women do not incite the lawless element to riot
about the polls; but that, instead, the