British Empire had been "deprived of two generations of women's leadership" because only a world's war could drill a new idea into a statesman's head? The war has drilled a great many new ideas into all our heads. Absence of brain matter could alone have prevented this infusion. 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 obligation on the one side and ambition 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 today are "giving their vitality to an anemic world," we wonder if the speaker has read a newspaper for the past half-dozen years. The passionate cruelty and the passionate heroism of men have soaked the earth with blood. Never, since it came from its Maker's hands, has it seen such shame and glory. There may be some who still believe that this blood would not have been spilled had women shared in the citizenship of nations; but the arguments they advance in support of an undemonstrable theory show a soothing 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 "naturally" occurred to man! Strange that no delegate to The Hague should have perceived so straight a path to peace! Strange that when Germany struck her long-planned, well-prepared blow, this cheap and simple measure failed to stay

her hand! War will pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless hope leaves the world.

That any civilized people should bar women from the practice of law is to the last degree absurd and unreasonable. There never can 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 housecleaning has made the 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 practised medicine for years, and have not revolutionized it. Painstaking service, rather than any brilliant display of originality, has been their contribution to this field. 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 have earnestly desired the franchise, it was because they saw in it justice to themselves, not the torch which would enlighten the world.

It is conceded theoretically that woman's sphere is an elastic term, embracing any work she finds herself able to do, not necessarily do well, because most of the world's work is done badly, but well enough to save herself from failure. Her advance is unduly heralded and unduly criticized. She is the target for too much comment from friend and foe. On the one hand, a keen (but of course perverted) misogynist like Sir Andrew Macphail welcomes her entrance into public life because it will tend to disillusionment. If woman can be persuaded to reveal her elemental inconsistencies, man, freed in some measure from her charm-which is the charm of retenue-will no longer be subject to her rule. On the other hand, that most feminine of feminists, Miss Jane Addams, predicts 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 part of it."

If Sir Andrew is as acid as Schopenhauer, Miss Addams is early Victorian. Her point of view presupposes a condition of which we had not been even dimly aware. Granted that domesticity palls on the solitary male. Housekeeping seldom attracts him. The teatable 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 showed no disposition to relinquish such pastimes until the arid days of prohibition, and even now they cling forlornly to the ghost of a cheerful past. When they assert, however, that they would have a much better time if women were present, no one is wanton 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 cupidity and ennobled by achievement-that this field of adventure, this heated race-track, needs to be relieved from dullness by the presence and participation of elderly ladies is the crowning vision of sensibility.

"Qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête," said Pascal; and the Michigan angel is a danger signal. The sentimental and chivalrous attitude of American men reacts alarmingly when they are brought face to face with the actual terms and visible consequences of woman's enfranchisement. There exists a world-wide and age-long belief that what women want they get. They must want it hard enough and long enough to make their desire operative. It is the listless and preoccupied unconcern of their own sex which bars their progress. But men will fall into a flutter of admiration because a woman runs a successful dairy-farm, or becomes the mayor of a little town; and they will look aghast upon such commonplace headlines as these in their morning paper: "Women Confess Selling Votes"; "Chicago Women Arrested for Election Frauds";-as if there had not always been, and would not always be, a percentage of unscrupulous voters in every electorate. No sane woman believes that women, as a body, will vote more honestly than men;

but no sane man believes that they will vote less honestly. They are neither the "gateway to hell," as Tertullian pointed out, nor the builders of Sir Rabindranath Tagore's "spiritual civilization." They are neither the repositories of wisdom nor the final word of folly.

It was unwise and unfair to turn a searchlight upon the first woman in Congress and exhibit to a gaping world her perfectly natural limitations. Such limitations are common in our legislative bodies and excite no particular comment. They are as inherent in the average man as in the average woman. They in no way affect the question of enfranchisement. Give as much and ask no more. Give no more and ask as much. This is the watchword of equality.

"God help women when they have only their rights!" exclaimed a brilliant American lawyer; but it is in the "only" that all savor lies. Rights and privileges are incompatible. Emancipation implies the sacrifice of immunity, the acceptance of obligation. It heralds the reign of sober and disillusioning experience. Women, as M. Faguet reminds us, are only the equals of men, a truth which was simply phrased in the old Cornish adage, “Lads are as good as wenches when they are washed."