work.  It may be a fair inference from this movement that women intend to abandon the sacred principle of Home Rule.  This abandonment is foreshadowed in a recent election in a small Western city, where the female voters made a clean sweep, elected an entire city council of women and most of the other officers, including the police judge and the mayor.  The latter lady, by one of those intrusions of nature which reform is not yet able to control, became a mother and a mayor the same week.  Her husband had been city clerk, and held over; but fortunately an arrangement was made with him to stay at home and take care of the baby, unofficially, while the mayor attends to her public duties.  Thus the city clerk will gradually be initiated into the duties of home rule, and when the mayor is elected to Congress he will be ready to accompany her to Washington and keep house.  The imagination likes to dwell upon this, for the new order is capable of infinite extension.  When the State takes care of all the children in government nurseries, and the mayor has taken her place in the United States Senate, her husband, if he has become sufficiently reformed and feminized, may go to the House, and the reunited family of two, clubbing their salaries, can live in great comfort.

All this can be easily arranged, whether we are to have a dual government of sexes or a mixed House and Senate.  The real difficulty is about a single Executive.  Neither sex will be willing to yield to the other this vast power.  We might elect a man and wife President and Vice-President, but the Vice-President, of whatever sex, could not well preside over the Senate and in the White House at the same time.  It is true that the Constitution provides that the President and Vice-President shall not be of the same State, but residence can be acquired to get over this as easily as to obtain a divorce; and a Constitution that insists upon speaking of the President as “he” is too antiquated to be respected.  When the President is a woman, it can matter little whether her husband or some other woman presides in the Senate.  Even the reformers will hardly insist upon two Presidents in order to carry out the equality idea, so that we are probably anticipating difficulties that will not occur in practice.

The Drawer has only one more practical suggestion.  As the right of voting carries with it the right to hold any elective office, a great change must take place in Washington life.  Now for some years the divergence of society and politics has been increasing at the capital.  With women in both Houses, and on the Supreme Bench, and at the heads of the departments, social and political life will become one and the same thing; receptions and afternoon teas will be held in the Senate and House, and political caucuses in all the drawing-rooms.  And then life will begin to be interesting.

SHALL WOMEN PROPOSE?