fragists, with great intelligence, decided to remain away from the polls, while exerting all their influence against the proposed measure. The votes of the men and the women were kept separate. The result was a majority of 100,000 men opposed to the bill. Out of an estimated number of 575,000 women of voting age, only 22,204 voted in favor of the bill. In 47 towns, not one woman's vote was recorded in favor of it, and in 138 towns the suffragists secured in each 15 votes or less; 864 votes were cast against it.

This illustrates a fact very important for legislators to recognize-the insignificant number of suffragists in the whole body of women. At the National Woman Suffrage convention in April, 1910, a petition bearing the names of four hundred thousand women asking for suffrage was presented to the Congress of the United States. When it is recalled that there are about twenty million women of voting age in this country who have not asked for a change, it will be seen that the commotion made by the suffragists bears a very small relation to their numbers.

The idea of forcing suffrage, with all its attendant complications, and the sacrifice of property privileges, and changing the whole status of forty-five million women and girls and girl-children at the bidding of four hundred thousand, is in itself a monstrous proposition. If the suffragists believe that suffrage would be advantageous to women, they are justified in urging women to ask for it. But to demand of men that the status of ninety-five per cent of the women of the country be wholly changed at the solicitation of five per cent, certainly shows an admirable hardihood.

IX

The suffragists have said repeatedly that if a suffragist amendment to the

Constitution were adopted, no woman need vote who did not wish to vote. This is equivalent to saying that if a sixteenth amendment, authorizing polygamy, were adopted, no one need practice polygamy who did not wish to do so. Nevertheless, it would change the status of every woman in the United States. Opposition to suffrage does not mean that women should not study public affairs, and take an intelligent interest in them. If women would read the proceedings in Congress and inform themselves upon state and national affairs, it would broaden their minds immensely, and there would be fewer suffragists. It would also add to their charms, because they could take a sympathetic interest in those public questions in which most men are more or less engaged. It was this ability to meet men on their own ground that gave the women of the French salons their power. Those glorious French women enchanted by their grace, their sweetness, and their exquisite femininity, and they ruled by virtue of their intellect and their profound knowledge of affairs. American women could, by the same means, exercise equal power.

The suffragists are quite correct in asserting that there are certain public questions in which women have a larger stake, and have probably a better knowledge, than men. One of these questions is divorce and remarriage. It is not overstating the fact to say that divorces in the United States, by their numbers and by the methods through which they are procured, have reached the point of a national leprosy. Perhaps the most important contributing cause has been the extraordinary indulgence shown to women by the divorce laws, which unfortunately make divorce cheap and easy, and force the husband to pay for it. There is always a demand for a uniform divorce law throughout the country, but the diffi

culties in the way have so far prevented any serious attempt to pass such a Federal law.

It has also been conceded for many centuries that women are the chief beneficiaries of monogamy, and the chief sufferers by lax marriage and divorce laws. The proposition need only be stated to prove itself that the limiting, if not actual wiping out, of divorce is the greatest question, not only of the family, but of the state, before the women of this country. But it is a striking and vital fact, that so far as the suffragists are concerned, they have avoided, in all their public and printed utterances, the slightest allusion to, much less condemnation of, divorce. And yet their fixed contention has ever been, that woman suffrage represents purification and reform!

It would be vain for the suffragists to say that divorce cannot be checked, and even abolished. In South Carolina there is not, and never has been, any divorce; but a husband and wife, in extreme cases, may get all the relief which is necessary by a legal separation. Among the twelve million Catholics in the United States there are no divorces, and very few legal separations. In all of the Protestant denominations there are found numbers of earnest clergymen who decline to remarry divorced persons. In the Episcopal Church, especially, a band of conscientious and far-seeing men exists who take the only ground which has so far proved tenable: that no divorced person should remarry; that neither the guilt nor the innocence of the divorced persons can be considered; that a certain percentage of innocent persons must suffer in the operation of the most beneficent laws; and that the only thing to be considered is the greatest good of the greatest number.

So far, however, from the suffragists showing any antagonism to divorce,

there seems to be a close relation between suffrage and divorce. It would be interesting to figure out the percentage of divorced women among the sufragists. Some of their most prominent leaders are divorced women. In the four suffrage states, all the causes for divorce exist that are recognized in the nonsuffrage states, and special causes which are peculiar to the suffrage states. For example, the last census (1900) shows that six women in Utah were divorced by their husbands for non-support.

The statistics of divorce show that the rate is practically higher in the four suffrage states than in any other states of the Union. There are five that have a higher rate of divorce than the suffrage states; but in three of these there are large Negro populations which furnish an enormous percentage of divorces. In Texas, for example, which has a larger percentage of divorces than any other state in the Union, the Census Bureau estimates that seventy-five per cent of divorces are granted to Negroes. In the other two states, in which there are very few Negroes, the divorce statistics show that the percentage of outsiders becoming temporary residents in order to obtain divorces, brings the rate for natives actually below that of the four suffrage states, in which the percentage of outsiders seeking divorce is small.

In addition to leading the country, practically, in divorces, these four states show that this abnormal rate of divorce prevails under conditions which are usually adverse to divorce. It is agreed among sociologists, and is proved by statistics, that divorce in general follows wealth, luxury, a highly artificial mode of life, and complex social conditions. In the four suffrage states, however, the general mode of life is simple and the social conditions primitive. These circumstances enhance very much the prob

able connection between suffrage and divorce. If suffrage gives any encouragement to divorce, that is enough to condemn it in the eyes of all political economists, all sociologists, all publicists, and all who love honor and decorum.

I ask pardon for introducing a personal note. My excuse is that I may help to disprove the fallacy that it is the woman who works that would profit by the ballot. I was but little past my twenty-first birthday when, on the strength of having earned about seven hundred dollars by my pen, I rashly assumed the support, by literature, of my family. The rashness, ignorance, and presumption of this can only be excused by the retired life I had led in the library of an old Virginia country-house, and in a community where conditions more nearly resembled the eighteenth than the nineteenth century. That I succeeded was due to tireless effort, unbroken health, a number of fortunate circumstances, and above all, what I am neither afraid nor ashamed to say, the kindness of the good God.

In the course of time, I became, through literature alone, a householder, a property-owner, a taxpayer, and the regular employer of five persons. My experience, therefore, has been more varied than that of most women, and I know something of the interests both of the woman who works and the property-owner, the taxpayer, and the employer. I can say with positiveness that there never was a moment when the possession of a vote would not have been a hindrance and a burden to me. I had no claim on any man whatever to help me fight my way to the polls; after I had voted I could not enforce my vote. I should have become involved in controversies which

might have impaired my earning capacity; and there would have been the temptation, ever present to the weaker individual, of voting to please my employers. From this I was happily exempt.

These considerations, great in any woman's case, would have been enormously increased in the case of a wife and the mother of a family, with all the sacrifice of property privileges and confusion of political and family relations which would have resulted. I admit that I should peculiarly dislike being divorced by a husband for non-support, as the six ladies were in Utah.

But none of the disadvantages of the ballot for me which I have mentioned, exist for men. They can fight their way to the polls, and enforce their votes; the controversies, which are so disastrous and undignified for women, are by no means so among men. In short, men have certain natural qualifications as voters which women have not, and never can acquire, and are perfectly adapted to working the great registering machine called suffrage.

In conclusion, it is my earnest hope and belief that the sound good sense of American women will defend them from suffrage, and protect their property privileges, their right to maintenance from their husbands, and their personal dignity. And if the women of this country will unite upon any true reform, such as the abolition of divorce, I believe their power to be so great that they can carry through measures which thinking men desire, but cannot effect without the assistance of women. I believe that the most important factors in the state are the wives and mothers who make of men good citizens to govern and protect the state, and I believe woman suffrage to be an unmixed evil.

WHEN the future historian comes to review the first decade of our twentieth century he may indeed be puzzled, but if he is fair to us he will recognize some of the difficulties under which our world-troubles and world-problems are being worked out. He will see that we are living, not in an ideal state of world-sympathy, but divided among many independent nations separated one from the other by commercial and political differences, and by the strong barriers of national patriotism. The persistent conception of world-empire seems at length to have given way before a number of communities intent upon their separate national existences, and uniting only to preserve a balance of power among themselves or to prevent any one from obtaining predominance over the rest. In our own decade this separation has been still further emphasized by tariff walls and colonial preferences, by carefully stimulated patriotisms, and, especially, by an enormous increase in the military and naval armaments of each country. The nations have become less subject to outside coercion, at the cost of an intolerable burden of militarism which has overrun the world.

The price of peace in battleships and cruisers, in coast-defense and dockyards, in armies, arsenals, and maintenance, has become the destructive plague of the civilized world. England has spent in the past year a third of a billion upon her army and her navy. The United States, great peace nation that we are, with a continent's work to

do and millions of acres to be reclaimed and utilized, spent one hundred and ten million dollars on our navy alone; and in twelve years we have increased our standing army three-fold. Four hundred millions from our revenues are pledged annually in pensions for past wars or in preparation for wars to come, while a bill to create an Appalachian forest reserve at the cost of a single battleship, a bill which would save double its cost to the nation each year in preserving timber and water-supply and soil, has failed three times, as being too expensive to be undertaken. In France, the financial situation is yearly more hopeless and alarming. Military debts and the expenses of new armaments absorb three-fifths of the entire national revenue. Germany has borrowed the money for her new navy, and thrown the burden on the coming generation; the empire which started life with a credit of a billion dollars is now, after forty years, bearing the burden of a debt more than twice as large. The total expenditure of the world last year upon entirely unproductive armaments by sea and land is not far short of two billion dollars.

This burden is not borne by great and wealthy nations alone. Other countries of lesser resources, and without even hereditary enemies, are arming themselves to the teeth against a possible attack by any nation whatsoever. We read that Norway and Sweden are building navies, that Argentina and Brazil have ordered Dreadnoughts and their attendant cruisers and boats of

supply. Not knowing what particular nation to fear, the nations of the world are preparing themselves each against the strongest, and the taxpayer looking about him is informed by the military and naval authorities that in the still further increase of armaments rests his only security from uneasiness and alarm.

Kipling has written a poem that is a terrible satire on our modern civilization. Dives, in hell, agrees in return for liberty to maintain peace on earth. He establishes headquarters in the money-centres, lends funds wherewith to purchase arms, and binds the nations so heavily in the bonds of debt that no one of them can afford to fight.

Behold the pride of Moab! For the swords about his path

His bond is to Philistia, the half of all he hath; And he may not draw the sword until Gaza give the word,

And he gain release from Askalon and Gath.

It is a sordid peace at best, of uncertain duration and, like all things connected with the devil and his ministers, enormously expensive. With the masses of our populations never more averse to war or more generally ignorant of fighting, we are competing in providing ourselves with the most deadly and most expensive weapons in unprecedented quantities. If there is some better way of maintaining our peace, our possessions, our national individualities, and our Christian ideals, than by arming more and more until the nations, already crippled in their industrial and humanitarian development, lead each other down a senseless race to bankruptcy, it is time we thought it out and found it.

In the realization of peace, three methods have been tried. The first of these has been to secure peace by means of international conventions. From these have arisen the Red Cross Society, providing relief from the actual

VOL. 106-NO. 3

sufferings of war, and protection for those engaged in the care of sick and wounded; the Open Door in China, that the commercial nations of the world may share equally in future opportunities for trade and commerce with the Orient; and finally the establishment of arbitration as a permanently available resource in international difficulties. But none of these measures has put a stop to competitive military preparations. In spite of our Peace Conferences, in spite of the Open Door and the permanent Board of Arbitration sitting at The Hague, each year has seen a steady increase in the sums expended upon military and naval armaments, together with burdens of taxation and mortgages upon the future never before contemplated.

The second method, that of an international agreement for the limitation of armaments, was proposed about eight years ago. It was thoroughly discussed at the last Peace Conference, and, after being blocked there by Germany, has since been frankly and almost universally abandoned as impossible. Admiral von Koester, late commander-in-chief of the German battle fleet, clearly expressed the attitude of the militarists on this point in his recent speech at Kiel:

'I have read with interest all the articles published on the subject,' said he, and I have not found one that offered any practical proposal. We ought to disarm! In the first place we will take the doctrine that only the absolutely stronger can disarm. He, however, will not do so. Then the vanquished can disarm. About the hardest condition which the conqueror can impose is when he says to the vanquished: "Disarm!" And we Germans know best of all what that means, when we remember the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the conditions imposed upon us then.