ous protests against ill-usage, and by pronouncing 'Kaiser Wilson' (who runs a close race with Mr. Roosevelt in the advocacy of woman suffrage) to be an antiquated product of the 'feudal south.'

Much censure has been passed upon the unreasonable violence of these women. The great body of American suffragists has repudiated their action, and the anti-suffragists have used them to point stern morals and adorn vivacious tales. But was it quite fair to permit them in the beginning a liberty which would not have been accorded to men, and which led inevitably to license? Were they not treated as parents sometimes treat children, allowing them to use bad language, because, 'if you pay no attention to them, they will stop it of their own accord'; and then, when they do not stop it, punishing them for misbehaving before company? When a sympathetic gentleman wrote to a not very sympathetic paper to say that the second Liberty Loan would be more popular if Washington would 'call off the dogs of war on women,' he turned a flashlight upon the fathomless gulf which sentimentality has dug between the sexes. No one would dream of calling policemen and magistrates 'dogs of war' because they arrested and punished men for similar offenses. Men are citizens. They enjoy every right which a free government can give, and they incur every penalty which law can justly inflict.

II

Agitators, we are told, are always sure of their market; but sometimes they have to go far afield to seek it. When Mrs. Pankhurst found her occupation gone in Great Britain, where women have become constructive patriots, and part of 'England's Effort,' she braved the sea, and from Australia

came a plaintive cry that she was buzzing in the streets of Adelaide, within the prohibited area. At the same time a moan from India betrayed the presence of Mrs. Annie Besant, who was offering her especial blend of theosophy and treason to the scandalized natives of Madras. In vain the Madras government explained to her that she was welcome to preach theosophy until the skies fell, but that she must leave out the treason. The unaccommodating lady refused the concession, saying that her theosophic campaign and her political campaign were necessarily interchangeable. In vain the authorities murmured polite requests that she would move on.' In vain the authorities of Adelaide made the same pathetic appeal to Mrs. Pankhurst. In the end, Mrs. Pankhurst was arrested, and familiar words — 'resisted arrest'; and Mrs. Besant was expelled from Madras, as she had formerly been expelled from Bombay. Great India and great Australia strove to be tolerant to their unwelcome guests; but the old song,

The landlord then aloud did say,
As how he wished they would go away,

adequately expressed the situation.

While Mrs. Besant was doing her little best to harass the Orient, that astute Oriental, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, was preparing a 'Parting Wish for the Women of America,' and bearing well in mind the sort of thing he would naturally be expected to say. The skill with which he modified and popularized an alien point of view revealed the seasoned lecturer. He told his readers that 'God has sent women. to love the world,' and to build up a 'spiritual civilization.' He condoled with them because they were 'passing through great sufferings in this callous age.' His heart bled for them, seeing that their hearts are broken every day, and victims are snatched from

their arms to be thrown under the car of material progress.' The occidental sentiment which regards man simply as an offspring, and a fatherless offspring at that (no woman, says Olive Schreiner, could look upon a battlefield without thinking 'So many mothers' sons!'), comes as naturally to Sir Rabindranath as if he were to the manner born. He is content to see the passion and pain, the sorrow and heroism of men, as reflections mirrored in a woman's soul. The ingenious gentlemen who dramatize biblical narratives for the American stage, and who are hampered at every step by the obtrusive masculinity of the East, might find a sympathetic supporter in this accomplished and accommodating Hindu.

The story of Joseph and his Brethren, for example, is perhaps the best tale ever told the world — a tale of adventure on a heroic scale, with conflicting human emotions to give it poignancy and power. It deals with pastoral simplicities, with the splendors of court, and with the 'high finance' which turned a free landholding people into tenantry of the crown. It is a story of men, the only lady introduced being a disedifying dea ex machina, whose popularity in Italian art has perhaps blinded us to the brevity of her biblical rôle. But when this most dramatic narrative was cast into dramatic form, Joseph's splendid loyalty to his master, his cold and vigorous chastity, was nullified by giving him an Egyptian sweetheart. Lawful marriage with this young lady being his sole solicitude, the advances of Potiphar's wife were less of a temptation than an intrusion. The key-note of the noble old tale was destroyed, to assure to woman her proper place as the guardian of man's integrity.

Still more radical is the treatment accorded to the parable of the 'Prodigal Son,' which has been expanded into

a pageant play, and acted with a hardy realism permitted only to the strictly ethical drama. The scriptural setting of the story has been preserved, but its patriarchal character has been sacrificed to modern sentiment which refuses to be interested in the relation of father and son. Therefore we behold the prodigal equipped with a mother and a trustful female cousin, who, between them, put the poor old gentleman out of commission, reducing him to his proper level of purveyor-inordinary to the household. It is the prodigal's mother who bids her reluctant husband give their willful son his portion. It is the prodigal's mother who watches for him from the housetop and silences the voice of censure. It is the prodigal's mother who welcomes his return and persuades father and brother to receive him into favor. The whole duty of man in that Syrian household is to obey the impelling word of woman and bestow bags of gold, blessings, and fraternal affection according to her will.

The expansion of the maternal sentiment until it embraces, or seeks to embrace, humanity, is the vision of the emotional, as opposed to the intellectual, feminist. "The Mother State of which we dream' offers no attraction to many plain and practical workers for the franchise, and is a veritable nightmare to others. 'Woman,' writes an enthusiast in the Forum, 'means to be, not simply the mother of the individual, but of society, of the state with its man-made institutions, of art and science, of religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual, personal and social, needs to be mothered.'

Needs to be mothered! When men proffer this welter of sentiment in the name of women, how is it possible to say convincingly that the girl student standing at the gates of knowledge is as humble-hearted as the boy; that she

- into any one of these fields. Their need for her maternal ministrations concerns her less than her need for the magnificent heritage they present. It has been said that the craving for material profit is not instinctive in women. If it is not instinctive, it will be acquired, because every legitimate incentive has its place in the progress of the world. The demand that women shall be paid men's wages for men's work may represent a desire for justice rather than a desire for gain; but money fairly earned is sweet to the hand and heart. An open field, an even start, no handicap, no favors, and the same goal for all. This is the worker's dream of paradise. Women know that lack of citizenship is a handicap. Self-love prompts them to overrate their imposed and underrate their inherent disabilities. 'Whenever you see a woman getting a high salary, make up your mind that she is giving twice the value received,' writes an angry correspondent to the Survey; and this pretension paralyzes effort. To be satisfied with ourselves is to be at the end of our usefulness.

M. Émile Faguet, that most radical and least sentimental of French feminists, would open wide to women every door of which man holds the key. He would give them every legal right and burden which they are physically fitted to enjoy and to endure. He is as unvexed by doubts as he is uncheered

VOL. 121-NO. 3

by illusions. He has no more fear of the downfall of existing institutions than he has hopes for the regeneration of the world. The equality of men and women, as he sees it, lies, not in their strength, but in their weakness, not in their intelligence, but in their stupidity, not in their virtues, but in their perverseness. Yet there is no taint of pessimism in his rational refusal to be optimistic. No man sees more clearly, or recognizes more justly, the art with which his countrywomen have cemented and upheld a social state at once flexible and orderly, enjoyable and heroic. That they have been the allies, not the dictators and not the inspiration, of men in building this fine fabric of civilization, is also plain to his mind. Allies and equals he holds them, but nothing more. 'La femme est parfaitement l'égale de l'homme, mais elle n'est que son égale.'

Naturally to such a man the attitude of Americans toward women is as unsympathetic as is the attitude of Dahomeyans. He does not condemn it (possibly he does not condemn the Dahomeyans, seeing that the civic and social ideals of France and of Dahomey are in no wise comparable); but he explains with careful emphasis that the Frenchwoman, unlike her American sister, is not, and does not desire to be, un objet sacro-saint.' The reverence for women in the United States he assumes to be a national trait, a national point of view, a sort of national institution among a proud and patriotic people. 'L'idolâtrie de la femme est une chose américaine par excellence.'

The superlative complacency of American women is largely due to the oratorical adulation of American men,

an adulation that has no more substantiality than has the foam on beer. I have heard a candidate for office tell his female audience that men are weak and women are strong, that men are

foolish and women are wise, that men are shallow and women are deep, that men are submissive tools whom women, the leaders of the race, must instruct to vote for him. He did not believe a word that he said, and his hearers did not believe that he believed it, yet the grossness of his flattery kept pace with the hypocrisy of his self-depreciation. The few men present wore an attitude of dejection, not unlike that of the little boy in Punch who has been told that he is made of

Snips and snails,

And puppy dogs' tails,

and can 'hardly believe it.'

What Mr. Roosevelt calls the 'lunatic fringe' of every movement is painfully obtrusive in the great and noble reform which seeks fair play for women. The 'full habit of speech' is never more regrettable than when the cause is so good that it needs but temperate championing.

'Without the aid of women England could not carry on this war,' said Mr. Asquith an obvious statement, no doubt, but simple, truthful, and worthy to be spoken. Why should the New Republic, in an article bearing the singularly ill-mannered title, 'Thank You For Nothing!' heap scorn upon these words? Why should its writer make the angry assertion that the British Empire had been 'deprived of two generations of women's leadership,' because only a world's war can drill a new idea into a statesman's head? The war has drilled a great many new ideas into all our heads. Mr. Asquith's cranium is probably not more perforated with them than is Mr. Wilson's. But 'leadership' is a large word. It is not what men are asking, and it is not what women are offering, even at this stage of the game. Partnership is as far as ambition on the one side and obligation on the other are prepared to go; and a

clear understanding of this truth has accomplished great results.

Therefore, when we are told that the women of to-day are 'giving their vitality to an anæmic world,' we wonder if the speaker has read a newspaper for the past three years and a half. The passionate cruelty and the passionate heroism of men have stained the earth with blood, red blood poured out inextinguishably to wrong and right this 'anæmic world,' which never since it came from its Maker's hand has seen such shame and glory. There are some who still believe that this blood would never have been spilled had women shared in the citizenship of nations; but the reasons they advance in support of an undemonstrable theory show an easy ignorance of events.

'War will pass,' says Olive Schreiner, 'when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the control and government of modern national life.' And why? Because 'arbitration and compensation will naturally occur to her as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national relationship.'

Strange that this idea never occurred to man! Strange that no delegate at The Hague should have perceived so straight a path to peace! Strange that when Germany struck her longplanned, long-prepared blow, this cheap and simple measure failed to stay her hand! War will pass when injustice passes. Never before that day, unless hope leaves the world.

III

That any civilized people should bar women from the practice of law is to the last degree unfair and unreasonable. There can never be an adequate cause for such an injurious exclusion. There is in fact no cause at all, only an arbitrary decision on the part of those who

have the authority to decide. Yet nothing is less worth while than to speculate dizzily on the part women are going to play in any field from which they are at present debarred. They may be ready to burnish up 'the rusty old social organism,' and make it shine like new; but this is not the work which lies immediately at hand. A suffragist who believes that the world needs house-cleaning has made the somewhat terrifying statement that when English women enter the law courts they will sweep away all 'legal frippery,' all the 'accumulated dust and rubbish of centuries.' Latin terms, flowing gowns and wigs, silly staves and worn-out symbols, all must go, and with them must go the antiquated processes which confuse and retard justice. The women barristers of the future will scorn to have 'legal natures like Portia's,' basing their claims on quibbles and subterfuges. They will cut all Gordian knots. They will deal with naked simplicities.

References to Portia are a bit disquieting. Her law was stage law, good enough for the drama, which has always enjoyed a jurisprudence of its own. We had best leave her out of any serious discussion. But why should the admission of women to the bar result in a volcanic upheaval? Women have practiced medicine for years, and have not revolutionized it. Painstaking service has been their contribution to their chosen field rather than any brilliant display of originality. It is reasonable to suppose that their advance will be resolute and beneficial. If they ever condescended to their profession, they do so no longer. If they ever talked about belonging to 'the class of real people,' they have relinquished such flowers of rhetoric. If they earnestly desire the franchise, it is because they see in it justice to themselves, not the torch which will enlighten the world.

Only the agitator, the visionary, and the sentimentalist choose to deal with illusions rather than with realities, and are more concerned with the influence they are going to exert than with the service they are going to render. A prominent and very feminine feminist has predicted with touching simplicity that 'the dullness which inheres in both domestic and social affairs when they are carried on by men alone, will no longer be a necessary attribute of public life when gracious and gray-haired women become a part of it.'

This is early Victorian. It is Coventry Patmore dallying with the sweets of suffrage. And it presupposes a condition of which we had not been even remotely aware. Granted that domesticity palls quickly on the solitary male. Housekeeping seldom attracts him. The tea-table and the friendly cat fail to arrest his roving tendencies. Granted that some men are polite enough to say that they do not enjoy social events in which women take no part. They have by no means abandoned such pastimes. On the contrary, they cling to them with an assiduity suggestive of relish. When they assert, however, that they would have a much better time if women were present, no one is rude enough to contradict them. But public life! The arena in which whirling ambition sweeps human souls as an autumn wind sweeps leaves; which resounds with the shouts of the conquerors and the groans of the conquered; which is degraded by treachery and ennobled by achievement; that this field of adventure, this heated racetrack needs to be relieved from dullness by the presence and participation of elderly ladies is the crowning vision of sensibility.

We are accustomed to hear what wo men would do in the civic world if they had the opportunity. We are accus