command the same wages. Take novel-writing, for example. Mrs. Humphry Ward's prices are the top of the trade. Take Melba and Patti-they cannot complain of low wages. Rosa Bonheur and Cecilia Beaux suffer no injustice in competing with men. Hetty Green can get as much out of the moneymarket as any broker. Even in the teaching profession, the agitation of the women teachers of New York state to have their wages equalized with those of men by act of the legislature would seem absurd to Californians, for in California women teachers receive the same wages as the men without any laws on the subject whatever, because there are never more than enough of them to supply the demand. (In Colorado, by the way, an equal-suffrage state, the women teachers at last accounts do not receive as much as the men teachers-showing that economics do not depend on politics there any more than in other places.) But an overcrowded trade is always illy paid-that is economic law. And the working-girls who suffer most, and whom all women want most to help, are invariably in the overcrowded trades.

The result of oversupply is that the employer can fix his own prices. If three girls are all trying for the same job (and it is more likely that there are thirty than three after it) wages can be lowered and yet lowered and there will still be girls enough to fill the factory or the store or the laundry. With men, this situation has been recognized long ago-and the powerlessness of the vote to affect it-and men have, therefore, organized their labor. When men's wages go too low or their hours are too long they strike and gain their point-if they gain it at all -by cutting off the supply of labor. That is an economic moveand therefore affects things. But politics do not control economics-if they did every laboring-man who is a voter would be getting two dollars a day at least and no days laid off.

The Pin-Money Worker.

Secondly, the working-girl is illy paid because she works for pin-money, not for a living wage. One of the largest stores in New York makes the rule that no girl shall be employed who does not live at home or with relatives. The reason is thus explained: "Our wage for beginners and for untrained grades of work is so low that no girl can live decently on it, unless she

lives at home and pays no board or else lives with relatives who help her along." That store always has more applicants than it needs, just like all the others. The girl who works to earn money simply to spend, or to provide only half of her support, is the average working-girl. No law can keep her out of the labor-market; and in the labor-market by economic principles she determines the price for her self-supporting sisters. It is a wretched state of affairs, but it requires no hard thinking to see that the ballot could not remedy it in any way.

The Temporary Worker and Her Age.

Third, the working period for girls is usually temporary. The average age of the woman workers of America is from eighteen to twenty-two. Half of them cease to be wage-earners at twentyfive. One-sixth more of them drop out by thirty-five. The truth is the working-girl only expects to work until she marries, and the one-third who stay on are largely the widowed or the divorced. Because the majority only work for four years out of their whole lives, they are willing to take low pay and they never become-nor, for the most part, try to become-really skilled workers, who command good wages. Men go into work to stay and work up to better positions each year-there is the economic difference, which no vote and no law can change.

For these reasons the anti-suffragists are not greatly swayed by the suffragist assertions that the ballot is needed by the working-girl. They also see, what the suffragist usually omits to consider, that from a third to a half of the working-women of the United States are at any one time under voting age. Any suffrage, therefore, that really proposes to give the workinggirl a vote must set the voting age at fourteen, at which age thousands of girls go into industry in the most crowded trades under the most trying conditions.

The remedy for the present condition of the working-girl lies in trades-unions, in the education of girls in handicrafts and in domestic science, in the agitation for a living wage, and the solidarity of the pin-money worker with her self-supporting sister, rather than in giving the ballot to a class so many of whom are not old enough to use it. What legislation is necessary and possible is now pushed forward heartily by the National Con

sumers' League, the National Child Labor Committee, and other bodies in which able men and women of all classes work together. It is worthy of note that the Consumers' League, through a prominent lawyer armed with a brief prepared by a woman, won in the Supreme Court a test case as to limiting the hours for working-women-the Curt Müller case in Oregonwhereas the courts of Colorado, an equal-suffrage state, threw out as unconstitutional an eight-hour law for Colorado working

women.

Woman's Working Status Not Yet Settled.

Woman is a new factor in most fields of industry. Man has been working away at his problems in the industrial world for centuries. It is going to take time to get justice for woman in industry, because she has brought in industrial complications and abuses that have to be studied and prevented not in a day, but through long adjustment. But to advocate the profound political change of a ballot for all women because one woman out of every six is in industry and needs the vote to change her economic conditions would be five times a mistake, especially since the sixth woman would not be really benefited at all and could not vote half the time on account of her youth. (We must not forget, either, the two million working-women in domestic service who need no legislation as to their wages.)

The anti-suffragists are just as anxious as the suffragists to improve the status of woman in industry. They are found in all the movements for the relief of the working-girl, for the protection of the younger girls by child-labor laws, for the help of working-women. They seek the same end, but they have no belief in the ballot as a means. They see in it not a short cut to the millennium, but a will-o'-the-wisp to follow which is a waste of time. In their ranks are many of the working-women themselves. As the July Remonstrance notes, the last great English petition against woman suffrage, presented to the House of Commons last March, signed by 243,852 women, furnishes striking proof of this fact. On the first page were the signatures of a peeress, who is a widow and a large land-owner, of a head mistress of a high school, of a highly educated working-woman, of a librarian, of an author, and of a wage-earner.

In the petition, as a whole, were representatives of every trade and profession and occupation and walk in life: authors, journalists, school-mistresses, farmers, shopkeepers, typists, clerks, domestic servants, mill hands, shop assistants, fishwives, coastguards' wives, soldiers' and sailors' wives, charwomen and caretakers.

Miss Gilder's View.

Miss Jeannette Gilder, in the New York Times recently gave her view "as one working-wo nan sees it" thus:

"I am an anti-suffragist because I have never heard a single argument advanced for the cause of suffrage that seemed to me convincing. .

"I resent the assumption of the suffragists that they represent the working-woman and that they are her best friends. They do represent a large element of the working-women, but not all; nor are they her best friends. They believe that they are, no doubt; but I believe that they are her worst enemies, because they teach her discontent and hold out golden hopes to her that can never be realized.

"I am just as much of a working-woman as Mrs. Kelly or Miss O'Reilly. I began at fourteen and have been at it ever since and expect to be at it till I die. I have worked hard and had as many responsibilities and discouragements as though I had rolled cigars in a factory or worked at a loom in a mill, and I have just as much right to speak for the working-woman as have they; and I wish to say right here, as I have said elsewhere, that I cannot see that the ballot would have helped me one iota in getting on in the world or have made the rough places smooth.

"I believe not only that the ballot in the hands of women would be a calamity, but I believe that it would prove a boomerang."

Ladies' Home Journal. 25: 15. November, 1908.

Why I Do Not Believe in Woman Suffrage.

Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphry Ward.)

There is, and always will be, a natural division between the spheres of men and women; an axiom we may deny as we will,

but which has a way in the end of "proving" itself "upon our pulses." Is there any reasonableness in denying that men have built up the modern political state, and that men must maintain it? The modern state, as we know, depends ultimately on force. This is constantly disputed by the idealists of the world; but if it were not the case mankind would not be spending these vast sums, all over the earth, on armies and navies; the Hague Conference would not have refused to admit any discussion as to the limitation of armaments; and your President, the chief,—as you yourselves insist-of the most pacific nation in the world, would not have sent a recent message to Congress, asking for four new battleships of the most advanced and formidable type. Women may say what they please, but the whole present state of the civilized world shows that force, physical force, armed with the most deadly inventions known to the brain of man, is what each modern state in the long run and in the last resort depends on for its national existence. We may lament that it is so; we may look forward to a time when the world will be really ruled by arbitration; but that day is a long way off. And, meanwhile, women have no right to claim full political power in a state where they can never themselves take the full responsibility of their actions, because they can never be called upon finally to enforce them.

But the modern state depends on several other fundamental activities-physical force being the ultimate sanction of all of them in none of which can women take any personal share. Finance and commerce are carried on by men; and you have had disastrous evidence during this passing year as to the effect finance may have upon the general life. You may say that perhaps finance and commerce might be more efficiently and righteously organized than they are, but shall we improve them by bringing in the votes and the political influence of those who have never had any guiding or responsible share in commerce and finance? Finance and commerce, again, depend on transport, on ships and railways, without which no modern state can exist; and ships and railways depend themselves upon the great metal and mining industries, which are the exclusive concern of men. A patriarchal state can be maintained practically without finance, transport or mining; but wherever these enter in they