mills. Or peace may temporarily exist when both parties are so equally powerful that both fear warfare, and both profit by truce. This peace, however, is always in danger of coming to an abrupt end by the introduction of some new machine, or by the immigration of some new and especially adaptable body of laborers.

Critics of the effort to establish by statute the right to leisure may contend that the process is an intolerably slow one, that a statute, also, is liable to termination by repeal, is as little stable and permanent as a trade agreement and may prove excessively difficult to enforce. Such critics can easily make out a strong case for their contention. It is true that, after the constitution of a state authorizes the legislature to act, the legislature may fail to do so, as has been shown by recent events in Colorado. Or, a legislature may enact measures which are illusory for want of penalties, or by reason of exceptions such as that which weakens the restriction upon the hours of labor of women in New York. Or there may be no provision for the appointment of factory inspectors, as in the case of the recent child-labor law of Alabama, which provides that children under the age of thirteen years shall not be employed at night in cotton mills, but makes no provision for officials to enforce the prohibition, and in the case of the mercantile employees law of New York City, where the Retail Dealers' Association succeeded in 1898, and each subsequent year, in having stricken from the municipal budget all appropriation for the salaries of mercantile inspectors.

Or, effective officers may be removed and incompetents appointed in their places, as has happened in many states.

Moreover, vigilance is needed even where workable statutes are enforced by faithful officers, lest valuable measures be repealed after being in force so long as to seem beyond all danger of attack. A case in point is the repeal of the so-called “FiftyFive Hours Law" in New Jersey, which had remained unaltered upon the statute books from 1892 to 1903. This statute provided that women and minors under the age of eighteen years should not be employed in manufacture longer than ten hours in one day and fifty-five hours in one week, or after six o'clock in the evening of the first five days of the week and noon on Saturday. Although this law had never been passed upon by the court of last resort in the state, or enforced with vigor by the factory inspectors, it had nevertheless been the means of assuring unusual leisure to women employed in industries in which men maintained powerful organizations and insisted upon compliance with the letter of the law, thus facilitating their own success in demanding the same leisure. The statute was so well regarded by a large number of employers, and a larger number of employees, that its repeal, in 1903, came as a distinct surprise.

Statutes restricting the hours of work of railway employees, in the interest of the safety of passengers, have in some cases been so defiantly and persistently violated by companies (holders of charters and franchises) as to drive the employees

into striking in order to enforce the obedience of their employers to the terms of the law, when recourse to the courts seemed to the workers not certain to bring forth a decision sustaining the terms of the statute.

Yet, acknowledging the inevitable slowness of the process of statutory recognition of the right to leisure, and admitting all the difficulties and obstacles to be encountered in making progress and in maintaining it when made, it nevertheless remains true that it is more dignified for the working people and infinitely more wholesome for the community to be enlisted in behalf of the enactment and enforcement of the law, than engaged in striving to establish and maintain a right without recourse to the law.

CHAPTER V

THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO THE BALLOT

It is now generally accepted that that legislation has proved wholly beneficent which has, during the past half century, afforded to women and girls their present wide-spread opportunity for education. Indeed, we are so accustomed to it that we realize with difficulty the fact that such provision on so large a scale is new to human experience. As a result of this far-reaching movement there is present in the community an element of distinctive intelligence available for social and civic usefulness such as never before existed. That we are far from getting the full benefit of the virtue and intelligence stored up in the community; that the leisure and culture which have come to home-keeping women might be utilized on a far larger scale than we have yet attained; that an ethical gain has been made whenever the new intelligence of women has become available in the body politic; and, finally, that other important gains may reasonably be expected in proportion as its availability is extended by conferring the franchise upon women, it is the object of this chapter to indicate.

It has been urged by opponents of the enfranchisement of women, that there are other methods by which this intelligence may be utilized without

active participation in political life, and this is not denied. Indeed, men who are faithful in the performance of their duty as voting citizens carry on, in addition thereto, many lines of social and civic activity. They do not, however, appear to believe that they would be more valuable in the performance of these voluntarily assumed tasks if relieved of their political duties. It is not members of philanthropic and civic committees who absent themselves from the polls; on the contrary. Why, then, should not women follow both lines of activity and prove even more effective in their philanthropic and educational work, by reason of their added powers as voting citizens?

Does anyone believe that the efforts of the Public Education Association of New York would have been less effective during the past ten years, if they had been reënforced by the presence in the electorate of the mothers, the teachers, and the other interested women, including the members of the Association itself?

The fear lest the votes of ignorant women may outweigh those of the intelligent could be met by the imposition of an educational requirement such as is already in force in Massachusetts. The utterly unreasonable fear that the votes of the depraved may outnumber those of the righteous scarcely needs mention. The balance of virtue and depravity among women compares at least fairly with that of the present electorate.

Women's Opportunities on Public Boards and Commissions.-Naturally, the first tentative step in