political expression woman's economic value is at the bottom of
the scale. She is the last to be considered, and the
consideration is usually about exhausted before she is reached.

She must do better work than men for equal pay or equal work for
less pay. In spite of this she may be supplanted at any time by a
political adherent, or her place may be used as a bribe to an
opposing faction. Women are weak in the business world because
they are new in it; because they are only just beginning to learn
their economic value; because their inherent tendencies are
passive instead of aggressive, which makes them as a class less
efficient fighters than men.

For these reasons women are and must be for years, if not for
generations, economically weaker than men. Does it appeal to any
one's sense of fairness to give the stronger party in a struggle
additional advantages and deny them to the weaker one? Would that
be considered honorable--would it be considered tolerable--even
among prize-fighters? What would be thought of a contest between
a heavy-weight and a feather-weight in which the heavy-weight was
allowed to hit below the belt and the feather-weight was confined
to the Marquis of Queensberry's rules? And yet these are
practically the conditions under which women do business in
forty-one of our States.

While the State does not owe any able-bodied, sound-minded man or
woman a living, it does owe them all a fair--yes, even a generous
opportunity to earn their own living, and one that shall not be
prolonged dying. I do not claim that woman suffrage would be a
panacea for all our economic woes. But I do claim that it would
remove one handicap which women workers have to bear in addition
to all those they share in common with men. I do claim that the
men of the future will be healthier, wiser and more efficient
wealth-producers if their mothers are stimulated by a practical
interest in public affairs. I do claim that that nation will be
the strongest in which the economic conditions are the most
nearly just to all, and in which co-operation and altruism are
the most completely incorporated in the lives of the people.

Mrs. Hala Hammond Butt (Miss.) discussed The Changed Intellectual
Qualifications of the Women of this Century, with the intense
eloquence of S