Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/359

Rh the suffrage, their instinct seems to be to draw back. Ask the women, one after another, in a representative community, if they wish to vote, and again and again will come the answers: "I haven't time," "My hands are overfull now," "How can I undertake a duty which means that I must inform myself upon all the public questions of the day?" Naturally, many of them, especially those who are temperance workers, or those whose property interests are not represented under existing conditions, desire the ballot. But the great majority are content to occupy themselves with the multitude of interests which are already theirs, and to leave the formal affairs of state to men. The great majority, when they speak sincerely, will say that home-making and its allied interests is their chosen life, and that its demands are so exacting that they must leave the work of government to other hands.

This attitude is certainly open to criticism. Perhaps it is true that the sons could be better educated by mothers who voted, that homes could be better made and protected by wives who held the power of the ballot, that the welfare of schools and charities would be furthered if women who are interested in them had a share in the making of the laws. Yet it would seem that if woman possessed by nature any great aptitude for political life, she would be eager to exercise it. It has been said that "the men are not what they are because they vote, but they vote because they are what they are." They make politics, and they are interested in the work of their hands. Women do not make it and (always in general) are not interested in it. If woman alone were to govern the state, how radically different would be her methods! And how can oil and water mix? Until she can disfranchise man and establish a rule of her own peculiar sort, woman may perhaps be expected to show indifference to political affairs. Furthermore, she might evince more alacrity for reaching out for the august power of the ballot if she observed that the men who exercise it thereby get what they want. But to her puzzled query, "If you want this reform or that measure, why don't you put it through?" the conclusive reply is that "you can't get at it," on account of the "primaries," or "the bosses," or "the spoils system," or the "rings," or the wheels within wheels of whatever other complications interfere to muddle the brain and thwart the will of the sovereign American people. A woman answered thus, and reflecting upon the suffrage, is apt to wonder, in her silly, feminine way, if the game is worth the candle.

Perhaps it is worth the candle. Many a wise man thinks so, and having the suffrage himself, a man should be able to estimate its value. However that question may be finally settled,