re's plays. As a general belief it is
still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its
popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone
applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to
the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before
1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won
any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the
human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the
convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would
confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how
the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by
human values.

The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He
will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women,
for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly
understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come
out of necessities. They express desire. They are power.

Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has
liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In
England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet
half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great
deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are
looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to
children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become
a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure
of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a
cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front.
The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives
have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage
qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of
statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise
use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail
how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to
organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day
women want--what? They are ready to want something: that descri