work, he must do his part in the world.  On the other hand, the woman must realize that she has no more right to shirk the business of wifehood and motherhood than the man has to shirk his business as breadwinner for the household.  Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.  Yet normally for the man and the woman whose welfare is more important than the welfare of any other human beings, the woman must remain the housemother, the homekeeper, and the man must remain the breadwinner, the provider for the wife who bears his children and for the children she brings into the world.  No other work is as valuable or as exacting for either man or woman; it must always, in every healthy society, be for both man and woman the prime work, the most important work; normally all other work is of secondary importance, and must come as an addition to, not a substitute for, this primary work.  The partnership should be one of equal rights, one of love, of self-respect, and unselfishness, above all a partnership for the performance of the most vitally important of all duties.  The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.

Suffrage for women should be looked on from this standpoint.  Personally I feel that it is exactly as much a “right” of women as of men to vote.  But the important point with both men and women is to treat the exercise of the suffrage as a duty, which, in the long run, must be well performed to be of the slightest value.  I always favored woman’s suffrage, but only tepidly, until my association with women like Jane Addams and Frances Kellor, who desired it as one means of enabling them to render better and more efficient service, changed me into a zealous instead of a lukewarm adherent of the cause—­in spite of the fact that a few of the best women of the same type, women like Mary Antin, did not favor the movement.  A vote is like a rifle:  its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.  The mere possession of the vote will no more benefit men and women not sufficiently developed to use it than the possession of rifles will turn untrained Egyptian fellaheen into soldiers.  This is as true of woman as of man—­and no more true.  Universal suffrage in Hayti has not made the Haytians able to govern themselves in any true sense; and woman suffrage in Utah in no shape or way affected the problem of polygamy.  I believe in suffrage for women in America, because I think they are fit for it.  I believe for women, as for men, more in the duty of fitting one’s self to do well and wisely with the ballot than in the naked right to cast the ballot.

I wish that people would read books like the novels and stories, at once strong and charming, of Henry Bordeaux, books like Kathleen Norris’s “Mother,” and Cornelia Comer’s “Preliminaries,” and would use these, and other such books, as tracts, now and then!  Perhaps the following correspondence will give a better idea than I can otherwise give of the problems that in everyday life come before men and women, and of the need that the man shall show himself unselfish and considerate, and do his full share of the joint duty: