a comprehensive view of the situation, it is no wonder the politicians laugh and the reformers are discomfited. The first great disillusion about women in public life came with the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments. This was in the beginning a women's idea; women suggested it, urged it, and ended by making it formidable in high circles where at first it had borne only a comic aspect. But how different was the shape in which it emerged from the chancelleries compared with the first magnificent thought of the women that demanded it! They had dreamed of They had dreamed of an international conference to abolish armaments, and so rid the earth at last of its darkest shadow and greatest crime. Women had no more idea of limiting armaments than they had of limiting murder or limiting smallpox. What they wanted was to cut out the whole hideous business, and be done with it. The letters and telegrams with which they bombarded their senators and representatives and so turned the suggestion from jest to earnest in the mind of statecraft had this purpose and none other. All this showed the American woman's power; the next turn in events revealed her weakness. When the plan for the conference came out, by a piece of legerdemain familiar to old correspondents, it was no longer a conference to abolish armaments, but only one to limit them. Here was the first great test, and enfranchised womanhood crumpled up under it. The women allowed their idea to be thus defeated and despoiled, and for the first time the politicians sensed how groundless had been their fears. And the second was like unto this. The unities demanded that women should sit on the commission that represented the United States. Not to mention the obvious fact that women had started the whole thing and made it possible, women were now equal citizens with men, woman had a greater interest than men in the subjects that conference was to discuss. When the just and reasonable request for woman representation there was refused, and women accepted the repulse and ignominy of that refusal, most of the remaining vision of woman's good influence disappeared. Next, as a device to salve the sting of the refusal, a so-called "advisory committee" was created, with nobody to advise and nothing to do, and women were offered places on this transparent expedient. When without protest women accepted such places, nothing was left to the most sanguine observer except a vague hope that in another generation women might become too wise to be fooled by such child's play, but that for the present, instead of being more astute than the men, they were more naïve. The conference proceeded with its distinguished labors. It did not abolish war or make war less likely or more difficult. It agreed to the discarding of types of weapons that had become obsolete, safeguarded the naval supremacy of Great Britain, and settled a small part of the problems of the Pacific in a way that may or may not prove desirable. When these results, so halting and ludicrous compared with the original conception, were accepted without protest by the women, the politicians must have hugged themselves with joy. All was exceedingly well in their domain. Yet one cannot deny that the promise with which women had en tered upon their new position was exceedingly fair to look upon. At the national conventions of the two great parties in 1920 it is not exaggeration to say that the only speeches above the level of mediocrity were made by women. The only ideas advanced that showed conviction, vision, and wisdom were advanced by women. The only persons who indicated any sense of the value of time were women. Not one of them overdid the speaking; all of them showed an admirable restraint and a rather astonishing power of condensation. One woman said more in two minutes than all the men together said in all the hours they devoted to their musty platitudes. These were the seventeenth and eighteenth national conventions the present writer had reported, and if experience had taught him anything about the subject, the women not merely surpassed, but eclipsed, the men. The only persons in either gathering that seemed to have any dignity or any feeling of responsibility were women. It was a man, or something of that order, who leaped upon the chairman's desk to do a frenetic dance to the accompaniment of lunatic yells, and it was men who conceived the brilliant and striking idea that the next President of the United States should be chosen by a preponderance of noise. men managers in politics to ignore the women electorate, and urged her hearers to alert and vigorous action that the great reform potency that lies in woman-suffrage may not be lost. But if the printed reports of her address were in any way just to her, which is probably too much to expect, she did not dwell upon the reason for the half-contemptuous attitude men are now assuming toward the woman voter. In this she was probably wise, which seems to be a habit of hers, but the reason need not be obscured here. Inquiries among great numbers of women in many parts of the country have brought out an identical answer. Women in America take virtually no part in politics because they feel they do not know enough about such things. They look upon these fields as shadowy and mysterious and will not without a guide trust themselves across the stile. Astounding it is to contemplate the difference in this respect between the American and the English woman. In the country accustomed to the greater democracy access to the suffrage makes women timid. In the country with the less democracy it makes them confident, aggressive, and independent. This is a phenomenon to baffle inquiry. English women vote as they please, vote for other women, vote to make their influence felt. American women vote as their husbands, brothers, or fathers indicate. No one ever heard an English woman say that she felt too timid about national affairs to take an intelligent interest in them, or insist upon a period of careful tuition before she would venture to call her political soul her own. As soon as she got the ballot she went forth to use it in her own sweet way, and no calculations are made in British politics now that do not include a careful guessing as to what she is going to do with her great power. It remained for the American woman, of all in the world, to be bogged in this strange notion of the exceeding mystery and intricacy of politics. How she found her way into it is yet unexplained; surely the American system of education is not so futile as this incident would show. It would not, for instance, induce youth to believe in alchemy or necromancy, yet of course the idea that there is some body of abstruse lore to be solved and some gradations of experience to be passed before one can make a tolerable citizen is not more footless. It is a singular commentary on this superstition that great organizations of women conduct their business with much more celerity and certainty and show a greater aptitude for affairs than similar organizations of men. No one that well remembers the annual conventions of the American Woman-Suffrage Society, for instance, needs to be told about this. The League of Women Voters, the largest American society of women, is against the notion that women should be voted for merely because they are women, and is diligently trying to educate its members so that they will cast their votes for persons "qualified" to hold office irrespective of sex. Irrespective also of party? Well, about this it meets stormy weather. At its last convention it was assailed in unmeasured terms by ladies of a strong partizan sympathy because it had not compelled all its members to be either Republicans or Democrats. The advantage that would accrue to the nation from such a division, or even to the two main parties, if you come to that, was not explained, but the episode showed that the officers of the league have enough trouble. The Woman's party, on the other hand, of which Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont and Miss Alice Paul are the leaders, holds that women should be elected to office because they are women, and looks forward to a woman President of the United States. the ordinary mortal it would seem to be looking fairly far. be looking fairly far. The Woman's party up to date is small, but sanguine. One may conclude on the evidence obtainable that comparatively few American women have any such notion of their duty at the polls, if any. To But the question that recurs always is how the view the great majority seem to possess can be reconciled with any faith in an important betterment of the electorate wrought by the addition of women. So far as one uninspired can see, it is the same old thing, but more of it. Hope springs eternal. The women that will vote in large numbers independently and on a non-partizan conviction for righteousness's sake have not yet appeared in this country. Possibly they are on their way, but nothing discernible heralds their approach. If political regeneration and the more intelligent conduct of public affairs were the main considerations on which we fought for woman-suffrage, it would be absurd to contend that the present results constitute a success. T HE first years of the war did n't affect the Richland farmers very much. It seemed far away from them. "Ach, over there in those old countries," August said with a kind of contemptuous blankness. The men talked about it down at the implement store and at the produce house. They said that this country would never be involved. They were opposed to that, the farmers, as they were opposed to anything that seemed unsettling. They were a conservative bunch about Richland. August had at first only a slight German feeling. Many of the farmers around Richland were English, and there had always been a little line of cleavage between the English and the German farmers. Sometimes, when August heard old Roland Yarborough "blowing off" about how wicked the Germans were, and that they ought all to be exterminated, it made him hot for a moment, made him feel that he was a German. All the feeling that he had was naturally and instinctively on the side of Germany. But most of the farmers were agreed. "Well, they 've got to fight it out among themselves. It 's their business; 't ain't ours." That was the way that August felt. He went about his own business. Grandpa was the one who got excited. The old man, so withdrawn, his inner life known now to no one but himself, buried in strange dreams and prayers and fervors, now suddenly came back to the world. It was as if all at once childhood things, which had long been buried, came surging to the surface and overwhelmed him with memories. He went back to his boyhood in that little village in Mecklenburg whose name the boys had never heard before. Now he was always talking about it-Gultberg. "Ja, in Gultberg den-" "Gultberg? What 's that? What's he talking about?" the boys asked, half amused. This was all far away to them. It tickled them, they said, to see "grandpa get himself all worked up" over something he had painstakingly read in the paper, come tottering out from his room, in his old felt slippers and patched brown trousers, his dark, sunken eyes burning, shaking one long, bony finger and pouring out a lot of broken English and German that they could only half understand. "Are de Germans so bad, den? Mein oldt Vater, mein Uncle Carl, I remember in de oldt country, were dey den all such bad men? No, no." They would listen, grinning a little, until he was exhausted and would go back to his room, shak731 1 Synopsis of preceding chapters in "Among Our Contributors." ing his head and mourning sadly, "Ach, no; nein," to sit in the old rocker, sadly, his hands in his lap, muttering as he used to do about the Sunday travel. Emma tried to calm him; she was afraid that the excitement would hurt him. She could n't see why he was so affected by this, by things so far away; but of course he was thinking about his old home. But when this country went in, all this was changed. Then feelings that had never been known before were all about. Then the taunts, the talk about Huns and Boche, made farmers like August for the first time actually realize their German ancestry. August had always taken it for granted that he belonged in this country. They awoke a deep racial resentment that could not come flaring out into the open, but had to remain smoldering; and that joined with the fear of change, the resentment at interference, into a combination of angry feelings. This centered chiefly in a deep opposition to the draft. To have some one tell his boys to do this and that! To take away his help on the farm just when he needed it most! To have somebody just step in and tell them where they had to go! Was that what happened in this country? Why had his people left the Old Country, then, if things were going to be just the same? Carl was twenty-three now, Johnnie twenty. Carl's was among the first three names drawn in Richland, where he had to register. It was on the list in the post-office-Carl Kaetterhenry, along with Ray Powers and Jay Bennett, the preacher's son. August stormed, wanted to know what right the Government had. But Carl took it quietly. There was no use kicking, he said. His name happened to be one drawn, and that was all there was to it. What roused August to the greatest anger was that Harlan Boggs, the banker's son in Wapsie, should get exempt, while his boy had to go. Harlan Boggs had appealed to the board and got exemption on the ground that he could n't be spared from the bank because of Libertybond work. But it did n't matter to the board, August said, that he could n't get help and that they should take his boy right in the midst of the harvest season. Johnnie was working for Frank that year, and Carl was the only one he had on the farm. They said, "Produce, produce," but how was he going to do it when he got no help? There was all this talk about the women working on the farms, but August did n't see many of those highschool girls from Richland coming out and offering to do his threshing for him. Where were all these women working, then? Grandpa quieted down after he learned that this country was in the war; regarded with a hurt, sorrowing, bewildered wonder that it should be fighting Germany. That was all that mattered to him, all that he could see of it. Carl went in to say good-by to him, embarrassed and a little afraid of what grandpa might do. The old man rose from his chair, holding it by one arm, and quietly shook Carl's hand. Then he returned to his solitary brooding. It was strange and remote, the touch of that dry, aged, bony hand, although grandpa had been there in the house ever since Carl could remember. |