The wholesale enfranchisement of women, native and foreign-born citizens alike, under the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, brings into the situation a new and confusing factor, about which it would be perilous to prophesy. Foreign-born women, largely ignorant of everything that we are accustomed to regard as “American,” subject to all of the influences and limitations involved in the word “foreign,” are swept by our naturalization laws helter-skelter into citizenship by the mere fact of their marriage or filial relation to a naturalized man, without any restrictions as to length of residence or personal fitness. And now the constitutional amendment has armed them with the ballot, with the potential capacity not only to strengthen, but to offset and nullify, the vote of the intelligent; not only to offset and nullify, but to double the political power of the ignorant, the misled, and the corrupt. Fortunately, however, as we have pointed out elsewhere, this is a potential rather than an actual peril. The foreign-born woman is, and will continue to be, very slow in assuming the power for mischief, or for good, which we have thrust upon her.[163] OLD EVILS ABOLISHED There was a day in American political history when, especially in the great cities along the Atlantic seaboard, the immigrant, in many cases the newly landed immigrant, was herded to the ballot box, sometimes without even the empty formality of naturalization, to cast an open ballot thrust into his hand by his padrone or some one else of his race who saw to it that he got his pay, usually in cash, but sometimes in the form of a job. Such practices, while they survive sporadically in out-of-the-way mining regions or the like where supervision of elections is lax or lacking, are no longer in vogue. The naturalization law of 1906, faithfully executed by the Naturalization Bureau, has completely abolished the old naturalization frauds and abuses, and the increasingly effective protection surrounding the ballot box, with the substitution of official ballots for the old voting ticket or open ballot, with more or less of the nonpartisan, alphabetical arrangement of candidates known as the “Australian” ballot, has made direct corruption, vote buying, not only perilous as a form of crime, but relatively useless because of the difficulty of knowing whether the goods are delivered. There is still bribery, but more and more it takes the form of payment for voting at all, of continued tenure of jobs within the gift or control of politicians and other oblique and indirect forms of remuneration.