posit certain
printed slips, called votes or ballots, dealing with esoteric mysteries
understood only by men like Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt, in ballot-boxes.
These receptacles are supposed to be behind, or very near, lawless
saloons, where gangs of hoodlums are waiting to assault the bearers of
these mysterious tickets. Thus Miss Seawell writes in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ for September, 1910: "The trouble would begin with the mere
attempt of women to deposit their ballots. A dozen ruffians at a single
polling-place would prevent a single woman from depositing a single
vote. There can be no doubt that this means would be used by the rougher
element and that the polls would become a scene of preordained riot and
disorder." Of course, such statements could not appear in a leading
magazine, in a land where women have been voting quietly for many years,
were it not for the perversity of the words which the author tries to
use, but which really use her. In other periodicals, equally
respectable, one learns that women, goaded on by the intolerable
political tyranny of men, have agreed as one soul to advance, with
ballots in their hands, and sweep graft and greed, drink and all other
human wrongs, into the sea of oblivion forever. Of course, this is
nonsense, or worse, and in this chapter I should like to turn away from
this warfare, leaving even the battered and prejudiced-soaked words
alone, as much as may be possible, and simply ask: What is political
life, not as defined in books, but as actually lived by a
self-respecting farmer or merchant of our acquaintance? What qualities
does political life presuppose in a participant? How does its use affect
him? What does it enable him to accomplish? What is the relation of a
woman--not some militant or unsexed ogre, nor a female breeding animal
in a harem, but our own sisters, wives and daughters as they really
are--what is their relation to this mysterious process?

If one approaches the political life of our modern democracies in this
simple spirit of inquiry it would seem that the first requisite for
participation is the ability to form sound judgments concerning
political matters; and all matters are now becoming political which
affect the welfare of the community. Certainly the citizen cannot devise
political machinery nor select candidates to work such machinery, much
less "cast a ballot," until he knows what he wants done. What are some
of the questions, then, on which he mus