ll voters."

Those who maintain that when women are independent and self-asserting,
they will lose their influence over men, assume that we view things
to-day as they did a century ago and that the thoughts of men are not
widened with the progress of the suns. The woman who can share the
aspirations, the thoughts, the complete life of a man, who can
understand his work thoroughly and support him with the sympathy born of
perfect comprehension, will exert a far vaster influence over him than
the milk-and-water ideal who was advised "to smile when her husband
smiled, to frown when he frowned, and to be discreetly silent when the
conversation turned on subjects of importance." It is a good thing for
women to be self-asserting and independent. There is and always has been
a class of men who, like Mr. Murdstone, are amenable to justice and
reason only when they know that their proposed victim can at any time
break the chains with which they would bind her.

This brings us to the last of the social or political arguments, viz.,
"Most women do not want to vote."[420] Precisely the same argument has
been used by slave owners from time immemorial--the slaves do not wish
to be free. As Professor Thomas writes[421]: "Certainly the negroes of
Virginia did not greatly desire freedom before the idea was developed by
agitation from the outside, and many of them resented this outside
interference. 'In general, in the whole western Sahara desert, slaves
are as much astonished to be told that their relation to their owners is
wrong and that they ought to break it, as boys amongst us would be to be
told that their relation to their fathers was wrong and ought to be
broken.' And it is reported from eastern Borneo that a white man could
hire no natives for wages. 'They thought it degrading to work for wages,
but if he would buy them, they would work for him.'" It is akin to the
old contention of despots that when their subjects are fit for freedom,
they will make them free; but nobody has ever seen such a time.

Reform of evil conditions does not come from below; leaders with visions
of the future must point the way. I once heard of a very respectable
lady of Boston who exclaimed indignantly against certain proposed
changes in child labour laws in North Carolina, where she owned shares
in a cotton mill. She maintained that the children who worked at the
looms ten hours a day expressed no discontent; it kept them off the
streets; and the o