Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/84

 which go to compose it is too big. Let it suffice to say that woman suffrage would certainly have been the law of the land to-day in every single State of the Union but for the fact that the general condition of women, from the purely material point of view, has in time past been so easy, as compared with that of the women of other countries. Their men have been so eager to give them everything for which they asked that the spirit of discontent has not invaded them sufficiently, nor taken a strong enough hold upon most of those whom it has invaded.

Now, however, women are becoming cheaper over there. In the Eastern States they outnumber the men; and the native American, with his higher ideals about women, is fast becoming submerged by the hordes of aliens, more than a million a year, who seek citizenship in 'the land of the brave and the home of the free,' bringing with them their half-savage notions of the inferiority of women. It was said at the time of the campaign for political equality in California, that there were enough Italians in San Francisco (most of this nationality being opposed to feminism) to veto woman suffrage over the heads of all the more enlightened citizens of that town, and that it was the country districts, in which there were fewer aliens, which carried the suffrage for the Californian women. Be this