able connection between suffrage and divorce. If suffrage gives any encouragement to divorce, that is enough to condemn it in the eyes of all political economists, all sociologists, all publicists, and all who love honor and decorum.

I ask pardon for introducing a personal note. My excuse is that I may help to disprove the fallacy that it is the woman who works that would profit by the ballot. I was but little past my twenty-first birthday when, on the strength of having earned about seven hundred dollars by my pen, I rashly assumed the support, by literature, of my family. The rashness, ignorance, and presumption of this can only be excused by the retired life I had led in the library of an old Virginia country-house, and in a community where conditions more nearly resembled the eighteenth than the nineteenth century. That I succeeded was due to tireless effort, unbroken health, a number of fortunate circumstances, and above all, what I am neither afraid nor ashamed to say, the kindness of the good God.

In the course of time, I became, through literature alone, a householder, a property-owner, a taxpayer, and the regular employer of five persons. My experience, therefore, has been more varied than that of most women, and I know something of the interests both of the woman who works and the property-owner, the taxpayer, and the employer. I can say with positiveness that there never was a moment when the possession of a vote would not have been a hindrance and a burden to me. I had no claim on any man whatever to help me fight my way to the polls; after I had voted I could not enforce my vote. I should have become involved in controversies which

might have impaired my earning capacity; and there would have been the temptation, ever present to the weaker individual, of voting to please my employers. From this I was happily exempt.

These considerations, great in any woman's case, would have been enormously increased in the case of a wife and the mother of a family, with all the sacrifice of property privileges and confusion of political and family relations which would have resulted. I admit that I should peculiarly dislike being divorced by a husband for non-support, as the six ladies were in Utah.

But none of the disadvantages of the ballot for me which I have mentioned, exist for men. They can fight their way to the polls, and enforce their votes; the controversies, which are so disastrous and undignified for women, are by no means so among men. In short, men have certain natural qualifications as voters which women have not, and never can acquire, and are perfectly adapted to working the great registering machine called suffrage.

In conclusion, it is my earnest hope and belief that the sound good sense of American women will defend them from suffrage, and protect their property privileges, their right to maintenance from their husbands, and their personal dignity. And if the women of this country will unite upon any true reform, such as the abolition of divorce, I believe their power to be so great that they can carry through measures which thinking men desire, but cannot effect without the assistance of women. I believe that the most important factors in the state are the wives and mothers who make of men good citizens to govern and protect the state, and I believe woman suffrage to be an unmixed evil.

WHEN the future historian comes to review the first decade of our twentieth century he may indeed be puzzled, but indeed be puzzled, but if he is fair to us he will recognize some of the difficulties under which our world-troubles and world-problems are being worked out. He will see that we are living, not in an ideal state of world-sympathy, but divided among many independent nations separated one from the other by commercial and political differences, and by the strong barriers of national patriotism. The persistent conception of world-empire seems at length to have given way before a number of communities intent upon their separate national existences, and uniting only to preserve a balance of power among themselves or to prevent any one from obtaining predominance over the rest. In our own decade this separation has been still further emphasized by tariff walls and colonial preferences, by carefully stimulated patriotisms, and, especially, by an enormous increase in the military and naval armaments of each country. The nations have become less subject to outside coercion, at the cost of an intolerable burden of militarism which has overrun the world.

The price of peace in battleships and cruisers, in coast-defense and dockyards, in armies, arsenals, and maintenance, has become the destructive plague of the civilized world. England has spent in the past year a third of a billion upon her army and her navy. The United States, great peace nation that we are, with a continent's work to

do and millions of acres to be reclaimed and utilized, spent one hundred and ten million dollars on our navy alone; and in twelve years we have increased our standing army three-fold. Four hundred millions from our revenues are pledged annually in pensions for past wars or in preparation for wars to come, while a bill to create an Appalachian forest reserve at the cost of a single battleship, a bill which would save double its cost to the nation each year in preserving timber and water-supply and soil, has failed three times, as being too expensive to be undertaken. In France, the financial situation is yearly more hopeless and alarming. Military debts and the expenses of new armaments absorb three-fifths of the entire national revenue. Germany has borrowed the money for her new navy, and thrown the burden on the coming generation; the empire which started life with a credit of a billion dollars is now, after forty years, bearing the burden of a debt more than twice as large. The total expenditure of the world last year upon entirely unproductive armaments by sea and land is not far short of two billion dollars.

This burden is not borne by great and wealthy nations alone. Other countries of lesser resources, and without even hereditary enemies, are arming themselves to the teeth against a possible attack by any nation whatsoever. We read that Norway and Sweden are building navies, that Argentina and Brazil have ordered Dreadnoughts and their attendant cruisers and boats of

supply. Not knowing what particular nation to fear, the nations of the world are preparing themselves each against the strongest, and the taxpayer looking about him is informed by the military and naval authorities that in the still further increase of armaments rests his only security from uneasiness and alarm.

Kipling has written a poem that is a terrible satire on our modern civilization. Dives, in hell, agrees in return for liberty to maintain peace on earth. He establishes headquarters in the money-centres, lends funds wherewith to purchase arms, and binds the nations so heavily in the bonds of debt that no one of them can afford to fight.

Behold the pride of Moab! For the swords about his path

His bond is to Philistia, the half of all he hath; And he may not draw the sword until Gaza give the word,

And he gain release from Askalon and Gath.

It is a sordid peace at best, of uncertain duration and, like all things connected with the devil and his ministers, enormously expensive. With the masses of our populations never more averse to war or more generally ignorant of fighting, we are competing in providing ourselves with the most deadly and most expensive weapons in unprecedented quantities. If there is some better way of maintaining our peace, our possessions, our national individualities, and our Christian ideals, than by arming more and more until the nations, already crippled in their industrial and humanitarian development, lead each other down a senseless race to bankruptcy, it is time we thought it out and found it.

In the realization of peace, three methods have been tried. The first of these has been to secure peace by means of international conventions. From these have arisen the Red Cross Society, providing relief from the actual

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sufferings of war, and protection for those engaged in the care of sick and wounded; the Open Door in China, that the commercial nations of the world may share equally in future opportunities for trade and commerce with the Orient; and finally the establishment of arbitration as a permanently available resource in international difficulties. But none of these measures has put a stop to competitive military preparations. In spite of our Peace Conferences, in spite of the Open Door and the permanent Board of Arbitration sitting at The Hague, each year has seen a steady increase in the sums expended upon military and naval armaments, together with burdens of taxation and mortgages upon the future never before contemplated.

The second method, that of an international agreement for the limitation of armaments, was proposed about eight years ago. It was thoroughly discussed at the last Peace Conference, and, after being blocked there by Germany, has since been frankly and almost universally abandoned as impossible. Admiral von Koester, late commander-in-chief of the German battle fleet, clearly expressed the attitude of the militarists on this point in his recent speech at Kiel:

'I have read with interest all the articles published on the subject,' said he, and I have not found one that offered any practical proposal. We ought to disarm! In the first place we will take the doctrine that only the absolutely stronger can disarm. He, however, will not do so. Then the vanquished can disarm. About the hardest condition which the conqueror can impose is when he says to the vanquished: "Disarm!" And we Germans know best of all what that means, when we remember the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the conditions imposed upon us then.

'We now come to the third principle: international disarmament. This must be an international agreement among all peoples. Do you believe that this is at all possible? For such a purpose there would have to be a permanent congress, which would be perpetually calculating in this fashion: "From to-day you have the right to build so many ships. Now, you may build another torpedo-boat because your economic interests have grown, your exports have risen so-and-so much." I consider that disarmament can only mean the paralysis of free development.

"There is, as Professor Harms has shown, a fourth principle of disarmament, disarmament based on alliance. Now, if one wants an ally one must be up to the alliance standard of power. To comply with that rule a nation must bring something with it into the alliance, an army or a fleet. If it has neither, and brings nothing with it, then it is not worth acceptance as an ally. But even alliances are not of eternal duration. Alliances appear today and are gone to-morrow, and the political horizon changes constantly from day to day. Even if ships can be quickly built, the organization, the building up of the system, is a thing that requires many years. Therefore, even in the case of an alliance, one would still need, in order to provide for the eventuality of fresh complications, to build and arm a fleet and to carry it to its full development.

"There can be no practical value in any proposal for international disarmament.'

And so Germany continues to pile up battleships and taxes, and other nations of necessity follow her lead.

Conventions have done much to promote peace and coöperation among civilized nations, but they have never affected a military appropriation or

delayed the laying of a single keel. Increases in armaments must continue so long as they remain competitive. But we have examples of nations which are withdrawn from competition in warlike preparations, the armies of which are never called into action; these nations are protected by the guarantee of their neighbors in secure and honorable peace. There is a third method in the realization of peace, and a means for disarmament which Admiral von Koester did not mention. It is disarmament by neutralization.

Neutralization is the imposition by international agreement of perpetual neutrality over land and water. Its purpose is the removal of objects of international dispute by placing them forever outside of the realm of war, which is lessened by their extent. Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, neutralization has maintained Switzerland in independence, integrity, and unviolated neutrality down to this day. In 1831 the same protection was extended to Belgium, and in 1867 to Luxembourg, with what effect in reducing the burdens of defense and minimizing the danger line of invasion, any garrison-card of the German or French army will show. Permanent neutrality was applied first to entire states lying between hostile neighbors, but soon it was recognized that points of dispute between nations and objects of attack in time of war were no longer in great part the territories of states themselves, but provinces and colonial possessions, and, most of all, the commercial advantages resulting from the exclusive possession of them. There followed the neutralization of Savoy, the Ionian Islands, the Basin of the Congo, and finally the permanent neutrality of the Suez Canal as an international waterway. In neutralization has lain a remedy ready to our hand, of which we have only slowly realized the power.

In removing lands and waterways forever from the field of possible war we may effectively check the growing menace of militarism, renew the abandoned work of disarmament, and meet the needs even of the armed and colonyholding nations of to-day.

What shall be the part played by the United States in the future of neutralization?

In the first place, the United States recognizes, or is interested in maintaining, its provisions in three different parts of the world. It joined with the principal commercial nations in the Treaty of Berlin of 1885, which recognizes the neutrality and the freedom to commerce of the entire basin of the Congo River; and it was the only power present at that conference to propose the permanent neutralization of all that part of Central Africa.

With regard to the Panama Canal, in 1901 there was signed with Great Britain the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty which, while abolishing the unpopular Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, affirmed for any inter-oceanic canal which shall be built across the isthmus the same provisions which govern the neutrality of the Suez Canal as established by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1888. By this it is agreed to maintain:

1. Freedom of transit in time of war or peace to all vessels of all nations. 2. Freedom of the Canal and its terminals from blockade.

3. A code of procedure for war-vessels entering and leaving the Canal.

4. That there shall be no fortifications along the route.

This treaty with England, which however does not amount to complete neutralization, since it is an agreement between two nations only, further provides that the Canal is to be safeguarded and maintained in neutrality by the United States alone, and consequently

is a compromise between neutralization and complete American control.

Since the beginning of the year, we have seen still a third instance of interest in neutralization in the proposal of the Secretary of State to neutralize the Manchurian railways. Whether that proposal is premature or not is undecided. At any rate, it is in conformity with the increased possibilities of neutralization, and with our recognized foreign policy in the past. It was the policy of the late Secretary Hay to urge the united action of all influential countries in maintaining the Open Door of trade in China. It is the policy of the present Secretary to accomplish the same end by uniting the commercial nations, and those with surplus money to invest, such as the United States, Japan, England, Germany, and France, in the building and control of international railways in the East, and thus assuring the Open Door by means of a union of their common commercial interests.

The control of the Manchurian railways is certain to be of no little importance in the future of that country. We are thoroughly aware of the tendency of railway interests to dominate the financial and political activities of a state; and if at some future time the various commercial nations which now control portions of the Manchurian railways should decide to separate their interests, China would be in the greatest danger of being divided as the result of an international misunderstanding. Neutralization of the railroads would at once and forever remove this danger.

But a far more important question than the future of Manchurian railways lies before the people of the United States. Militarism is destructive of better things, and many a loyal American is questioning what occasion the United States may really have for its continued extension. We need not fear invasion; we have no hereditary