II

For a long time to come women will be forced to leave the administering of the nation as well as of states and cities to men, for men are still too strong for them.  The only sort of women that men will spontaneously boost into public life are pretty, bright, womanly, spineless creatures who may be trusted to set the cause of woman back a few years at least, and gratify their own sense of humorous superiority.

Women would save themselves much waste of energy and many humiliations if they would devote themselves exclusively to helping and training their own sex.  Thousands are at work on the problems of higher wage and shorter hours for women of the industrial class, but this problem of the carefully nurtured, wholly untrained, and insecurely protected woman they have so far ignored.  To my mind this demands the first consideration and the application of composite woman’s highest intelligence.  The industrial woman has been trained to work, she learns as she grows to maturity to protect herself and fight her own battles, and in nine cases out of ten she resents the interference of the leisure class in her affairs as much as she would charity.  The leaders of every class should be its own strong spirits.  And the term “class consciousness” was not invented by fashionable society.

There is another problem that women, forced imminently or prospectively to support themselves, must face before long, and that is the heavy immigration from Europe.  Of course some of those competent women over there will keep the men’s jobs they hold now, and among the widows and the fatherless there will be a large number of clerks and agriculturists.  But many reformes will be able to fill those positions satisfactorily, and, when sentiment has subsided, young women at least (who are also excellent workers) will begin to think of husbands; and, unless the war goes on for many years and reduces our always available crop, American girls of the working class will have to look to their laurels both ways.

III

Here is the reverse of the picture, which possibly may save the too prosperous and tempting United States from what in the end could not fail to be a further demoralization of her ancient ideals and depletion of the old American stock: 

No matter how many men are killed in a war there are more males when peace is declared than the dead and blasted, unless starvation literally has sent the young folks back to the earth.  During any war children grow up, and even in a war of three years’ duration it is estimated that as against four million males killed there will be six million young males to carry on the race as well as its commerce and industries.  For the business of the nation and high finance there are the men whose age saved them from the dangers of the battlefield.