me a rather wide-spread abuse. Under the conditions of the
State, with many new settlers constantly arriving, it has long been
thought necessary to employ paid workers to register voters, get them
out on election-day and influence those who are uncertain. After 1896,
women were often hired to do this work, and were paid from three to five
dollars a day. With their weak sense of party affiliation, it is
claimed that they will work for the party that pays best. A candidate
with plenty of money may hire so many workers that it becomes a system
of wholesale bribery. It is universally conceded that this is an abuse,
and that many women look upon election service as a source of pin money
to a degree that is undesirable. Meantime, practical politicians assured
me that it was a system the women found in operation when they came in;
that far more men than women were paid; and that the abuse could be
corrected by proper legislation.

To summarize the matter, we may say that equal suffrage in Idaho has
simply accentuated the movement toward setting women free to live their
individual lives which general education and participation in industrial
life has already carried so far all over the country. Equal suffrage is
accepted there, as the higher education of women is accepted in
Massachusetts, and the results in the two cases have been much the same.

Surely these reports carry the matter beyond the experimental stage.
Conditions in Colorado and Idaho are not identical with those in the
East, but they are similar enough to make the experience of these States
amount to a demonstration. Meantime the new obligation resting on women
is profound. They must learn to "sweat their tempers and learn to know
their man." They must become students of public affairs and of
institutional life. Old issues are past; and equal suffrage will soon
prevail everywhere. Women, like men, have more "rights" in our modern
democracies than they can use. Woman's Rights are largely realized; from
now on we must front Woman's Duties.

IX

The Modern Family

The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual
impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us,
at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our
neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even
the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little
direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of u