home yesterday, a home where an overworked mother was trying to combine the task of child-minding with cooking, washing, and housemaid's work.
The thinking, wage-earning woman does not wish then to go back, but forward. The State is not a mere name to her—an abstraction. Whether she willed or no, she has had to come into a new relation to it. She sees that there is a larger life, and that she has to become an active and conscious part of it. Every year, whether she will or not, this fact is forced home. She may do her duty in the old-world sense well enough, but that will not save her or her dear ones. Of what use to keep her little ones clean and sweet if they have to sit with diseased and neglected children—as they probably must to-day?
The question of wages, of public health, of education, of housing, her fate in sickness, in widowhood, in sudden calamity, in old age—the fate of all the unfortunate, the lost, the suffering, the helpless—all these can not long remain matters of indifference. They are forced daily on her attention in painful and intimate ways. But she can have little or no voice in them, save in co-operation with her fellows: that is to say, she has for larger social purposes little power save as a citizen.
•••••
These last words will raise a cry of protest, and bring me face to face with the whole army of the critics of Suffragette methods!
"The clever woman," says a lady writer, "sits at
