"A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, Makes that and the action fine." Active participation in political life is not a refining, an ennobling, a purifying influence. Is it desirable that the half of the people to which the interests of the home, of the heart, of the religious and moral education of the young are especially committed, should be hurled into the maelstrom of selfish passion and coarse excitement? The smartness and self-assertiveness of American women are already excessive; they lack repose, serenity, and self-restraint. If they rush into the arena of noisy and vulgar strife, will not the evil be increased? Will not the political woman lose something of the sacred power of the wife and mother? Are not the primal virtues, those which make life good and fair and which are a woman's glory,--are they not humble and quiet and unobtrusive? The suffrage has not emancipated the masses of men, who are still held captive in the chains of poverty and dehumanizing toil. Do women themselves, those, at least, in whom the woman soul, which draws us on and upward, is most itself, desire that the vote be given them? But whatever our opinions on the subject may be, let us not lose composure. "If a great change is to be made," says Edmund Burke, "the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing the mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate." Whether or not woman shall become a politician, there is no doubt that she is becoming a worker in a constantly widening field. The elementary education of the country is already intrusted to her. She is taking her position in the higher institutions of learning. She has gained admission to professional life. In the business world, her competition with man is more and more felt. In literature, in our country at least, her appreciativeness is greater than man's, and her performance not inferior to his. There is a larger number of serious students among women than among men. In the divinely imposed task of self-education, they are fast becoming the chief workers. They are the great readers of books, especially of poetry. The muse was the first school-mistress, and the love of genuine poetry is still the finest educational influence. The vulgar passions and coarse appetites which rob young men of faith in the higher life and of the power to labor perseveringly for ideal ends, have little hold upon the soul of woman. Her betrayers are frivolity and vanity, and a too confiding heart; and the more she is educated the less will she take delight in what is merely external, and the greater will become her ability to bring sentiment under the control of reason and conscience.