women and to their preparation for the world might read between the lines a lesson to be profited by in shaping future educational courses. Here is also a special message to any woman who has not yet formed her future. May it help her to decide before she takes a step; otherwise, she may find herself wandering around in a seemingly aimless circle, as I did, filling the part of a misfit, until she hits upon the thing for which she is temperamentally, as well as mentally, fitted. For this floundering means physical and mental despair, and from that I would save all women, if it were possible.

I had had a fair preparatory school education and my whole idea in taking up college work was to fit myself to be a teacher, for there was no other profession open to women that offered like opportunities just then. Four happy, care-free years in college, and I was launched upon the world, ready to do and dare.

Then the trouble began. A brief career of teaching in my home town very clearly showed me that my heart was not in the work. I was successful, because of energy and perseverance, but I well remember how I had to pretend that I was doing something else, all through the day, to put the necessary snap into it. There are plenty of teachers, this minute, who are doing the same thing some of them have confessed it to me. Isn't it a pity?

Opportunity came in a strange manner. I had an inherited taste and love for music and the drama. The leading morning paper in my home town a city of about 100,000 people — needed someone temporarily to report musical and dramatic happenings. I heard of it, applied, and my reportorial career started at the princely sum of $3 a week. That first $3, however, gave me a greater sense of richness than my large pay envelope from the school, for I began to realize that here, at last, was the thing I was fitted for a life in the business world where I could see the world and be part of it. And, when I was allowed to do general reporting and my "scoop" on a certain baseball story made a New York editor think that it had been written by a man, I felt that all that was

necessary was to pack my trunk, go to New York, and receive immediately a staff position on any paper I deigned to select, at a princely salary! Well-I had to learn, but I shouldn't want any daughter of mine to go through what I did in the learning.

You will laugh when I tell you that it was midsummer when I came to New York. It is laughable because everyone knows that no one in the business world is taking on assistance of any kind during the summer months. So, although my newspaper friends did their very best, I had to give up the idea of entering upon a literary career, because I could not hold out financially.

This lesson I learned only after months of living in a room without any daylight or air, eating only when I could get money enough from what I had written to pay for my meals, writing at night and tramping the streets all day, trying to sell my stories, until I began to feel the inroads of discouragement upon that enthusiasm which had, so far, carried me over the rough places.

At this point I made up my mind to learn stenography and to follow no matter where it led. A wealthy woman living not far from New York engaged me as companion because of my knowledge of music and because she said I never looked worried! Through her kindness, I was enabled to study at night, and three times a week to go to a business college in New York until I had progressed far enough to be able to "rattle around" in a stenographer's position at $8 a week. I ground away for a year in that first positionhammered the typewriter. It is significant that I instinctively kept from my employer the fact that I was a college woman. I set my teeth when facing office discipline, bad tempers, smoking, profane language, uncongenial associates, and many other things against which my whole being cried out. During that year, I got my business training.

Still I floundered. The next position was a little better than the last. There was a little more salary and more responsibility. My executive ability began to be recognized. My training as corres

pondent brought me to the attention of a prominent house which was doing advertising through this means and here at last I stumbled upon the path that was to lead me back to where I started six years before. Finding to their astonishment and my own that I had distinct ability for promotive and advertising work, I was placed in charge of that department. The results of my work there brought me to the notice of the promoters of a magazine requiring just that combination of editorial and advertising experience which the last two years had given me. From that, it was a natural step to the work I now have in hand; and so, at the end of all these years in New York, I have only just begun. The point I want to make is that this is too long a circle for any woman to traverse merely to find herself, for it presumes perfect health, sound common sense, boundless patience, unlimited faith, and an intuitive knowledge of people and things; and these are qualifications that not everyone possesses.

My story is, of course, only one of hundreds of similar experiences among women of education, whether they have had college training or not. Every day they drift into the employment offices in the big cities— stenographers who want to learn decorating, decorators who want to do editorial work, teachers who are lured by the strange fascination that advertising seems to have, women who want to be secretaries but who don't know the first thing about stenography and who actually resent the suggestion that it is a necessary qualification for the profession they wish to enter. The unrest manifested by the majority of women in business shows very plainly that they are not happy in the sort of work into which they have stumbled through an early lack of knowledge of the profession, they were best qualified to enter. And the conclusion that has been reached by those of us who have come by the long and thorny road is that the real place to begin the shaping of a career is in the preparatory or high school.

Fortunately, the high schools in the large cities throughout the country have

recently begun to introduce into their work some suggestion of domestic training, and musical courses that have done a great deal of good; but, even so, girls in their high school days need guidance as to the course that will best prepare them for the future. I believe that every preparatory school of the grade just beyond the ward school should have a woman whose sole duty should be to study carefully the case of every girl who gives any indication of promise and to advise her what to choose as a profession; and especially to show the girls that not all are fitted to enter public or professional life and that there is a wider field for them than any offered by business - the field of home. home. If the same plan of having advisors were also to be followed in the women's colleges, there would be fewer misfits in business and more girls who would realize the important places they might occupy after graduation in the life of their own homes and of their home towns.

Happily, within the last year or two, groups of educated women in a number of large cities have begun to realize the importance of helping young girls to shape their future. To that end, they have arranged for some woman who has succeeded in her chosen profession to lecture before the high school girls, to tell them of the possibilities, the hardships, and the requirements in her own particular field of work, so that they may hear, from women who have made the struggle, just what it means to succeed. For example, in the high school at Syracuse, N. Y., Mrs. Van Rennsselaer, of the Household Art Department of Cornell University, addressed the girls; and a prominent dressmaker, a teacher, a public stenographer, and others representing a variety of professions open to women, told of their experiences while making a career. As a result their young hearers began to realize that not every girl has to be a teacher if she has her own living to earn. Certain professions of which they thus heard made a peculiar appeal to some of them; while many finally decided that, after all, home was a pretty good place.

Equally important, because of its practical assistance to wage-earning women, is the bureau of employment for educated women, founded in New York about two years ago by graduates of all the prominent women's colleges. It has the support of the colleges thus represented, and on its board of directors are women prominent in philanthropic and social work. It is open not only to college women but also to non-collegiate applicants whose experience and training place them in the same relative position in professional work. One of the chief aims of this bureau is to aid women who are beginning their careers, as well as to find larger opportunities for those of long experience and thoroughly tested efficiency. Although it has been in active operation less than a year, its success in finding the right people for the right places has been so great that branches are now to be formed in other large cities.

The promoters of this bureau have recognized not only the importance of advisory work such as I have outlined, but also the lack of it in the colleges. To help supply that deficiency they have engaged a woman of long experience in settlement work to consult with and advise those who come to the bureau in search of work, and also to visit business firms throughout the city, to find out the opportunities they offer to educated women and to gain their coöperation. Another member of the staff assists her in the most important work of fitting applicants to positions for which they are suited. This involves a careful study of the requirements of the position offered by the employer and a thorough inquiry into the experience, qualifications, and tastes of the applicant. Without revealing the Without revealing the identity of the firm offering the position, the general scope of the work is outlined to the applicant, together with the present salary offered, possibilities of advancement, and any other details that would enable her to decide whether it is the kind of opening she is looking for. If it does not make a distinct appeal to her, she is not sent for an interview, but other applicants are questioned until just the right person is found. When a position

is filled in this way, it is apt to stay filled to the satisfaction of both employer and employee.

The chief officer of the bureau was invited early this year by the faculties of Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Holyoke colleges to appear before the students and to tell them of the work of the bureau, of the necessity for practical training for various careers, of the requirements of the several professions, and of what to do to prepare themselves in certain lines before leaving college. These things may lead to the introduction into the curricula of elective business courses to be offered during the last two years of college. Such teaching of stenography, typewriting, office detail, secretarial work, editorial work, and commercial art, supplemented with frequent lectures by prominent men and women actively engaged in these lines, would soon limit the work of the bureau to the mere filling of positions. In the meantime, however, they are planning to reach out still further, investigating existing business conditions and requirements, studying the possibilities of every new field that opens up for women.

This story of mine has made no mention of the loneliness, with its consequent temptations, that is the lot of the woman who is who is blindly groping her way alone in the great business centres. Those of us who have experienced it are aghast at the wish of some women with happy homes and children to follow a career. Ask the next business woman you meet which she would choose - if she had her choice. I know now what her answer will be. To some business women, of course, comes the chance to enter the divine field of wifehood and motherhood; but a larger proportion are too busy, too tired, too discouraged, to be able to have much social life, and so the years pass and they find themselves among the number of women who are called "self-sufficient," "self-reliant," "independent" (how I have come to hate these words), when in reality they are longing to exchange the empty glory of success for the home-coming of someone and the clinging of chubby arms.

H

BY

ERE are some of the political reforms that Kansas has obtained since Walter Roscoe Stubbs has come into politics less than ten years ago: State institutions under high class boards, out of politics.

All banks, state and national, operating under a guarantee to pay the depositors. A statute requiring licenses from sellers and promoters of stocks.

A state treasury that pays interest to the people.

Sound control of all public utilities railroads, telephones, express companies, telegraph lines, gas and electric companies, and street cars.

A just inheritance tax law.

A workingman's compensation law. A judicial ouster established against recalcitrant public officials.

A compulsory referendum for all franchises granted in Kansas cities. Two cent passenger fares.

A maximum freight law.

hedge of wrinkles. A hard, firm mouth, that his enemies think brutally cruel and crafty, is slit into a loose-skinned, pinkish face, above a lean, angular jaw. A neck that takes a sixteen collar - small for the large bony frame beneath it - adds to the cast of cruelty of his mobile features. Shoulders that bow easily, a slight stoop in the top of the lank frame, and an impression of a velvety foot beneath the long straight legs, complete the picture of the man known in the Kansas railroad lobby as the "old red fox."

He was born - extremely poor - in Richmond, Ind., November 7, 1858, the year of Roosevelt's birth. He came to Douglas County, Kan., forty-one years ago. As soon as he was old enough he had to follow the plow, but at eight years of age he began business. He borrowed a team of mules and went over to Lawrence, where a railroad was being graded, and worked by the day. He was a frugal lad (though he now knows how to spend what he's got). In time he

own and got a small grading contract.

cities.

Abolition of passes, registry of lobbyists, and establishment of the primary, providing for a direct vote for the nomination of all elective offices.

"What are you trying to do?" Stubbs was asked.

"I am trying to run a state as I would run a business," was his characteristic reply. Look at his picture; it portrays a stubborn man a fighter. Stubbs has graying red hair, thinning around a full, bulging forehead. His grayish blue eyes are inclined to squint. And they are set in a

He took to feeding "Bohunk" camps; he had a feeding contract at the time of the building of the big drainage canal in Chicago, in 1893. He became a millionaire one of the few in Kansas. Just before he entered politics, at Lawrence, his home town, he was declaring that the Y. M. C. A. business was the greatest thing in the world, and that he was going to devote the rest of his life to it. His enthusiasm is a hardy perennial, but it thrives ever on the yet unaccomplished.

Stubbs is a driver: he has followers but

not friends. Many of those who are closest to him in politics have no social relations with him. He consults little with his supporters. He issues orders, but takes little advice. He had lived to be nearly fifty years old without even taking the time or interest to vote at elections, being too engrossed in his business.

Stubbs, besides being a railroad contractor, was a wealthy bank president in a college town, and influential in Y. M. C. A. circles, when in 1902, M. A Low suggested that he run for the state legislature from Douglas County. M. A. Low was a general attorney for the Rock Island Railroad, and also he was Stubbs's friend. It meant nothing coincidental to Stubbs that a big Senatorial fight was coming off the next year (in 1903) when the Rock Island people wished to see Curtis go to Washington, and that he lived in Douglas County, the natural territory of Stanley and Long, who were the candidates opposing Curtis. Stubbs ran for and was elected to the state legislature in 1902, utterly innocent, on the old "popular man" gag. And he voted for Curtis.

The first thing he noticed was the enormous retinue necessary to run things at the Capitol. There were doorkeepers and janitors of all grades, supervisors and assistant supervisors of ventilation to the fifth and sixth degrees. He stood this for about thirty days; then he asked for an inquiry, and found out that it was considered that he had made a wrong move. Stubbs took lessons in political mismanagement; three times he saw that special new offices were created. To organize for Long, a combination was tied up for state printer (two men, in reality drawing money for this job); the payroll was loaded with men to support Curtis because the Long and Stanley elements had combined. But Stubbs didn't like superintendents of acoustics and ventilation in the Kansas people's state house while he was representing Kansas people. So, with the LongStanley machine and the Missouri Pacific element in control the real fight was between George Gould and the Moore brothers in New York-in came Stubbs with his inquiring mind, his business

knowledge, his genius for organization - and mad clean through. Probably he was plain mad long before his moral sense got to working. He was ignored, and his side was losing, and it didn't sit well with him. When he was a boy twelve years old, working for a farmer named Davis, another young fellow said a certain hedge couldn't be got down inside of five hours. "It can," persisted young Stubbs, and in three hours and a half he had tramped it down with his feet. Stubbs, aged eighteen years, heard that a murderer was concealed in a barn in Lawrence and that Sheriff Moore was going after him. "Mr. Moore," said the youth, "You have a large family. Let me go." And he went in after the murderer, single-handed. Down in the Panhandle, contractor Stubbs had a crew of 4,000 men. Along came a joint outfit to sell liquor, and the first night the boss went out and, unassisted, did the Carrie Nation act himself. Stubbs didn't lie down when his first session of legislature left him unrecognized.

The combination that defeated Curtis defeated Hoch for state printer. Hoch was extremely popular, and he was defeated by trickery. The people rebelled but they could do nothing for they could express themselves only at the county conventions (controlled by doorkeepers and assistant superintendents of ventilation) and at state conventions (controlled by the interests). But red-headed Quaker Stubbs, jeered at for his bill of inquiry, saw in the record of the Curtis machine remnants out of which to build another machine and make Hoch a governor; and he machinated. The end, at any rate, was the nomination of Hoch for governor in 1904.

Stubbs ran again for the state legislature in 1904; he said he wanted to "clean up." He was elected chairman of the central committee, before the election of November, 1904, and became speaker of the house of representatives.

Here enters the new Stubbs. During the preliminary fight for Hoch he began to see the evils of corporate money in politics, the little influence of the people and of the individual man. He an