rendered comparatively harmless
by being given the ballot. For it is characteristic of a republic that
its political machinery, created in order to carry out the will of the
people, comes to respond with difficulty to that will, while being
perfectly susceptible to other influences. Republican government, when
not modified by drastic democratic devices, is an expensive, cumbrous,
and highly inefficient method of carrying out the popular will; and
casting a vote is like nothing so much as casting bread upon the waters.
It shall return--after many days. By voting, by exercising an
infinitesimal pressure on our complex, slow-moving political mechanism,
one cannot--it is a sad fact--do much good; but one cannot--and it
should encourage the pessimistic Mr. Kipling--one cannot, even though a
woman, do much harm.

This is not, however, a disquisition on woman suffrage. There is only
one argument for woman suffrage: women want it; there are no arguments
against it. But one may profitably inquire, What will be the effect of
the emergence of women into politics upon politics itself? And one may
hope to find an answer in the temperament and career of certain
representative leaders of the woman's movement. Let us accordingly turn
to the accredited leader of the English "votes for women" movement, and
to the woman in the American movement who is best known to the public.

That Miss Jane Addams has become known chiefly through other activities
does not matter here. It is temperament and career in which we are
immediately interested. What is perhaps the most outstanding fact in the
temperament of Miss Addams is revealed only indirectly in her
autobiography: it may be called the passion of conciliation.

Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions written herself down for a
fighter. She has but recently been released from Holloway jail, where
she was serving a term of imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence." In
a book by H. G. Wells, which contains a very bitter attack on the
woman's suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"), she is described
as "implacable"; and I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells refers
as being "as incapable of argument as a steam roller broken loose." The
same things might have been said of Sherman on his dreadful march to the
sea. These phrases, malicious as they are, contain what I am inclined to
accept as an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.

No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst