Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/45

 Rh labor agitators and all Socialists as "undesirable citizens." What must have been his surprise when that did not settle the social question forever. With that ban upon him every agitator was surely expected to go into lifelong hiding. But the other thing happened. A new deluge of protests came pouring in and, such is the wicked humor of the masses, it became an honor to be an "undesirable citizen." Now "third-term Teddy" is trying hard to make good. He is standing for "all the people" at the present time at Goldfield, and "will not allow any injustice to the workingmen." Even the imperial Theodore has found out as did once the late Mark Hanna that the workingmen are more easily cajoled than blustered into submission. He who would not quail before the biggest bad bear has had to quail before the social question!

This subject is taking tremendous proportions. It is cropping up in the school and the college, in the pulpit and on the public platform, in the press and in the home, in the workshop and out of it. It is the paramount question of the day.

Woman to-day is priding herself on the progress she is making. She is conscious of her power over the rising generation. She looks with joy to the place she will assume in the future. Therefore she cannot afford, for a day or an hour, to delay to post herself upon the great subjects of the day! The social question is not necessarily all dry economics and hard, ugly disagreeable tasks. The art, music, poetry, drama and literature of each succeeding age, that has been of value and has lived, is that which has stirred the human soul to progress! It has portrayed the sufferings and wrongs and misery of the oppressed. It has ridiculed the tyrant and the oppressor. It has satirized outworn customs, manners and laws. It has pointed out wrong and upheld right and truth. It has held up to the people the mirror of the future. There is not a field in which woman moves where she cannot make herself useful—in the nursery where she tells her little fairy-tales to the babes, in the factory where she meets the