This page has been validated.
AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT
291

didn't know before. Now I wouldn't be afraid for you even to have the vote."

And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel chair and the man in the Green Park and the Tuileries and the man with the flag was saying, the newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndicated round the world. The Matin had it in Paris, the Times in London and the Tageblatt in Berlin. You read it in all languages: "The women are wonderful. We didn't know before."

GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY

Then couldn't a woman who could cast a shell, cast a vote? Parliaments trembled on the verge of letting her try.

It wouldn't be at all the difficult undertaking it used to look to those women of yesterday, whose place was in the home pouring afternoon tea or embroidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day they would scarcely have to go out of their way at all to the polls! They could just stop in as easily as not, as they went down the street to their day's work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant Jones's wife is out of the home now anyway from six o'clock in the morning until seven at night making munitions. Some one must support her family, you know. Well, all over the world a new call began. Simultaneously in every civilised land, through the crack in the window of the government house where man gathered with his fellow man, you could hear it. In some lands yet it is only a mur-