That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely evidence of their intellectual youth.

Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly amused, to find in New York and other eastern cities little narrow-gauge street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of cars over the oldest and roughest of road beds.  The Westerner declares that nowhere in the East does he find surface cars that equal in comfort and elegance the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or Washington home town.

“Recently installed.”  There you have it.

The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric rolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of difficulties in the way of replacing them.  Old franchises have to expire or otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced; greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money have to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to be set in motion before the old and established city can change its traction system.

The new western town goes on foot until it attains to a certain size and a sufficient prosperity.  Then it installs electric railways, and of course it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.

New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical way because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories, outworn theories of law, government, and social control.  They cannot get rid of these at once.  They have used them so long, have found them so convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them something admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and to accept.

Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of.  Until recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal preferences and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any social theory.  When they found themselves in need of a social theory it was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most progressive, the most idealistic.  They made their choice unconsciously, and they began the application of their new-found theory almost automatically.  The machinery they employed was the long derided, misconceived, and unappreciated Women’s Club.

CHAPTER II

FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE

Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West—­say in Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska—­you cannot have a very adequate idea of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be when nobody loves it.  The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing of boards, painted a muddy maroon color.  Around it is a stretch of bare ground strewn with ashes.  Beyond lies the main street, with some good business blocks,—­a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a Masonic Temple in pressed brick.  The high school occupies a treeless, grassless, windswept block by itself.