g in
the various professions.

The charge of business incompetency is disproved by the 503,574 women
who are engaged in trade and transportation, the 980,025 in
agriculture and the 1,315,890 in manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits. Every community also furnishes its special examples of the
aptitude of women for business, now that they are allowed a chance to
manifest it. Statistics show further that one-tenth of the
millionaires are women and that they are large property holders in
every locality. Whether they earned or inherited their holdings, the
fact remains that they are compelled to pay taxes on billions of
dollars without any representation.

The military argument--that women must not vote because they can not
fight--is seldom used nowadays, as it is so clearly evident that it
would also disfranchise vast numbers of men; that the value of women
in the perpetuation of the Government is at least equal to that of the
men who defend it; and that there is no recognition in the laws by
which the franchise is exercised of the slightest connection between a
ballot and a bullet.

The most persistent objection--that if women are allowed to enter
politics they will neglect their homes and families--is conclusively
answered in the four States where they have had political rights for a
number of years and domestic life still moves on just as in other
places. In two of the four while Territories women had exercised the
franchise from seventeen to twenty-one years, and yet a large majority
of the men voted to grant it perpetually. Women do not love their
families because compelled to do so by statute, or cling to their
homes because there is no place for them outside. This same direful
prediction was made at every advanced step, but, although the entire
status of women has been changed, and they are largely engaged in the
public work of every community, they are better and happier wives,
mothers and housekeepers because they are more intelligent and live a
broader life. But they are learning, and the world is learning, that
their housekeeping qualities should extend to the municipality and
their power of motherhood to the children of the whole nation, and
that these should be expressed through this very politics from which
they are so rigorously excluded.

The objections of the opponents have been so largely confuted that
they have for the most part been compelled to make a last defense by
declaring: "When the majority o