1890 became the first woman-suffrage state. Colorado adopted the reform in 1893; Utah and Idaho, in 1896. For several years thereafter no further progress was made, and interest in the enfranchisement of women seemed to be dead. It had a lively resurrection, however, toward the close of the first decade of the twentieth century. In the first place, the movement for direct government naturally roused the women to demand their share in the game. Furthermore, changing economic conditions, especially the concentration of industry in large establishments, had attracted (or forced) women more and more into the business world to earn their living under practically the same conditions as men. Domestic service, school-teaching, keeping boarders, typesetting, bookbinding, and work in the cotton mills were no longer the only occupations open to women, as they had been when Harriet Martineau visited the country in 1840. Women had entered the professions as doctors, lawyers, and preachers. In 1910 more than a hundred thousand young women were attending universities, colleges, and professional schools. Tens of thousands were filling public positions in the civil service. About one in five of the employees in mills and factories were women of sixteen years of age or over. Obviously the new economic status of woman gave her not only an interest but an important stake in legislation dealing with hours, wages, employers' liability, and sanitation. Again, the extension of the functions of the State into the fields of economic and social regulation, the multiplication of the public agencies in welfare work, charity, correction, health, and domestic relations, called for the services of women in public life. And the demand for service carried with it the reciprocal grant of recognition. Finally, the militant suffrage movement in England, started by the Women's Political Union in 1905, undoubtedly roused the women of this country

1 The census of 1920 shows 8,500,000 women engaged in gainful occupations, as contrasted with 2,500,000 in 1880. The rate of increase of the men workers in the forty-year period was 124.2 per cent, and of the women workers 233 per cent. During the decade 1910-1920 women workers in the automobile factories increased 1408 per cent, while the same decade showed a decrease of 1,500,000 women farm laborers.

to a greater activity, although it did not inspire them to resort to horsewhipping, window-smashing, monument-hacking, arson, and the hunger strike, like their English sisters.

In 1910 the renewed efforts of the suffragists bore fruit in the capture of the state of Washington, and in the next two years California, Kansas, Arizona, and Oregon gave the ballot to women. The defeat of woman suffrage in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, however, in 1912, coupled with the declaration of the platform of the Progressive party in favor of equal suffrage, led to a revival of the Susan B. Anthony amendment for nation-wide woman suffrage. A Senate committee reported in favor of such an amendment in 1913, but the Senate rejected the proposal a year later. The defeat of suffrage in four important Eastern states (Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) in 1915 seemed to confirm the hopelessness of getting the measure adopted by state action, Illinois being the only state east of the Mississippi that had admitted the women to the vote, except on a few questions of local import, such as school administration. A mildly militant form of coercion in the shape of parades with saucy banners, the annoyance of public men opposed to suffrage, the "picketing" of the White House, was probably less effective than the gradual winning of the Western states. Politicians pay more heed to votes than to petitions. By 1916 the women in a dozen states had the right to vote for ninety-one presidential electors (approximately one sixth of the electoral college), and the candidates of both the great parties expressed their approval of woman suffrage. Mr. Wilson was still in favor of the accomplishment of the reform by state action, but Mr. Hughes came out for the Susan B. Anthony amendment. The accession of the great state of New York to the suffrage ranks in 1917 hastened the movement. In January, 1919, the House passed the amendment; and in July the Senate concurred, by the narrow margin of 56 to 25 votes. Only twenty-two states had ratified at the close of the year. The Woman Suffrage Association worked with redoubled effort to get the necessary number of ratifications to allow the women to take part in the presidential election of 1920. Their work was crowned with success

when Tennessee ratified as the thirty-sixth state, on August 28, 1920. An electorate of more than twenty-five million was privileged to vote in the Harding-Cox contest ten weeks later.1

The extension of political privileges to the citizens by these various measures of popular government has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in responsibility, while the enormous extension of government activities has increased the administrative machinery at a rapid rate. The national civil-service list alone grew from 108,000 at the close of the nineteenth century to 325,000 fifteen years later. The vast number of officials to be chosen at elections made the "ballot's burden" almost intolerable to the electorate, especially when measures were added to it to be voted on by referendum. A closely printed ballot in a recent South Dakota election was more than six feet long. The ballot in an Oregon county election in 1922 contained the names of one hundred and forty-two candidates for forty-two offices, in addition to twenty-nine measures to be decided by a referendum vote. Various means of relief for the overburdened voter have been devised. We have already noticed the Oregon pamphlet of instructions (p. 464). A more efficient device is the "short ballot," widely used in municipal government, which reduces the number of minor officials to be elected and concentrates power in the hands of a few responsible men of whose qualifications and character the electorate may be expected to form some judgment. Several states have reorganized

1 The following diagram shows the extension of the suffrage since Washington's day. The shaded portions represent the proportion of the voting population to the total population of twenty-one years of age or over.

1790

1840

1870

1920

their government on this principle. For example, in 1917, Governor Lowden of Illinois effected an administrative reform by which the functions of one hundred and twenty-five executive officers, boards, and commissions were consolidated into nine departments, each managed by a director appointed by the governor with the consent of the state senate. The voters of the state had thenceforth but seven executive officers to elect (all but one for a term of four years) besides the civil-service commission and the board of trustees of the University of Illinois. The next year Massachusetts followed with the consolidation of about eighty separate administrative units into twenty departments. A dozen states have adopted the reform in greater or less degree. Even in states where the attempts at a radical consolidation have failed (as in New York in 1915 and 1921), much has been accomplished. For instance, in New York a state-tax commission and a public-utilities commission united a great number of independent and often conflicting agencies and abolished about two thousand offices of doubtful need.

It is in the government of the American cities that the greatest reform has been made, just as it is there that the worst evils of inefficiency and corruption have existed. The evils have been due chiefly to the unprecedented growth of the cities in the last generation. In 1880 the urban population was but 29.5 per cent of the total. By 1920 it had grown to 51.5 per cent, and the rate of its increase in the decade 1910-1920 was more than seven times the rate of increase in the rural districts. Now one person in six of our population live in cities of 500,000 or more. Migration and immigration have contributed nearly five times as much to the growth of the city population as the natural rate of increase. The drain on the country by the economic and social attractions of city life has long been a commonplace in the studies of our sociologists and economists. After the disappearance of abundant free land in the West and the concentration of industry in the great urban centers, the immigrant (coming in ever larger numbers from the poorer countries of southern and eastern Europe) tended to remain in the cities, an easy prey to the manipulations of the political bosses and a difficult problem

for the agencies of Americanization. It has not been uncommon in some of the large cities in the days immediately preceding an election for the courts to rush through fifty naturalizations an hour-aliens made Americans at the rate of almost one a minute! The foreign-born constituted only 7.5 per cent of the population of the country districts in 1910; but in the cities of over 500,000 they comprised 33.6 per cent, and in some of the smaller cities their numbers rose even to 40 or 50 per cent.1 For their redundant and ill-digested population the cities have undertaken an increasing number of services. They not only furnish police and fire protection, water, light, and schools, but numerous charitable, correctional, recreational, and educational advantages as well. The poorest immigrant can have optical or dental treatment at the free clinics, a bed in the free hospital wards, the use of free parks, playgrounds, baths, libraries, and art museums, for all of which Mr. John Corbin in his "Return of the Middle Class" (1923, pp. 16-35) sees the middle class being taxed out of existence. Rapidly as the urban population has been growing, the city debts have increased about three times as fast, until today they amount, for the cities above 30,000, to $4,000,000,000. New York City alone has a debt far larger than that of the forty-eight states of the Union combined, and its annual budget runs into the hundreds of millions. Our cities have grown to be great business corporations, requiring a unified and scientific administration. But that is precisely what they did not begin to have until a comparatively few years ago.

From the colonial days down to the end of the nineteenth century the cities in America preserved the form of government of the chartered borough, with an executive (mayor), a legislature (aldermen, council), and courts—all exemplifying the political scheme of the division of powers. The election of the city legis

1 In Passaic, New Jersey, for example, the foreign-born numbered 52 per cent of the population. In the South the foreign-born population is almost negligible, but of course the cities of that section of the country have their race problem to deal with. The negroes comprise more than half the population of the cities of Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and Montgomery.