Now, if populations be considered in these three groups, instead of political divisions merely, it will be found that only 5,193,116 people in the suffrage states of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Kansas are under the law which fixes the ideal "age of consent" at 18; that 6,229,263 people are under this beneficent law in the non-suffrage states of Florida, Missouri, and Tennessee, and 17,161,100 people have passed this law in the partial suffrage states of Delaware, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, and Wisconsin; it should be observed, too, that the women voters in the partial suffrage states—less than 5 per cent. of those women vote, by the way—have nothing to do with electing the men who passed this and the other laws discussed by Mrs. DeForest. Like proportions of population hold with respect to all the laws passed in the three classes of states; taking the best law in each case, it may be shown that more people have it under male suffrage than under equal suffrage.
Thus far this article must seem disappointing to sincere suffragists for it reads like an "anti" document. In the length and breadth of this Union there are no distinctive results of woman suffrage where it has been granted in part or in whole.
But there are abundant results of the feminist movement. In agitating for the ballot Lucretia Mott and her fellow and sister suffragists builded better than they knew. In not following the English method of making suffrage a paramount issue "first, last, and all the time," they and the latter-day suffragists have rapidly brought to pass the feminist reforms, including the extension of the suffrage to women. They have not played the shrew like the English militants, and they are making greater headway than the militants. In this country the redress of woman's grievances has come ante hoc and cum hoc—not post hoc, and hardly ever propter hoc—with respect to woman's suffrage. The cases of California and Washington, the male-elected legislatures of which gave to women workers eight-hour laws at the same time they granted them the suffrage, are fairly typical; "indirect influence" accomplished both results.
Whether the vote in woman's hands may ultimately be better utilized; whether she may use it to aid in freeing the men voters from their thraldom to long ballots and the bosses, with the result of giving both sexes the direct influence on their government that they both lack—that is a question quite beyond the scope of this article.
THE BABY AND THE BEE
The baby lay in her carriage looking up at the over-hanging soft green leaves and white flowers of a lilac bush. A light wind came rather chilly from the north, despite the day of blue sky and flooding sunshine, and so the carriage had been wheeled a little around a south corner of the house, and left there. Baby was alone with her thumbs and fingers, her big wide eyes and the warm sunshine and her busy little brain. She was a baby of early mental development. Her parents thought her in the way to be a genius.
In the white flowers among the soft green leaves of the lilac bush busy worker bees foraged. They worked actively in the warm sunshine, some lapping up with long tongues of marvelous complexity the nectar from the open flowerets, while others loaded their thighs with the sticky yellowish pollen. They came and went between the flowers and their distant hive, each one doing its own work unaided and unhindered and even apparently unnoticed by any other.
The baby watched them with big wide eyes, uncomprehending, for nature study had not yet come into her curriculum. She liked their activity though, and more than once put up her tiny hands uncertainly as if to feel or grasp them.