The one great fact that stands out is this: That the voting quality of a number of our states is not and never has been subject to review, from the point of view of _national_ political ideals, of Americanism. So long as we have citizens of states that vote who are not citizens of the nation, we have a disrupting force in our national political organization. Citizenship in the United States is constitutionally defined in Amendment 14 thus: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the states in which they reside.” No other kind of citizenship is provided for in the Constitution. A state may need voters, and undoubtedly many of the first-paper men, pioneers in our western states, have voted wisely and well, with a grasp of local conditions. But because of the greater variety in our present immigration as compared with that of former years, and because American citizenship, including the power to vote, is a matter for national valuation, a state should no more arrogate unto itself the power to make its own citizens than to coin its own money or set up its own postal system. The time has come for conscious statesmanship, for international purposeful dealing with this fundamental element in our political organization. A situation quite as much in need of national review concerns the relation of women to citizenship. An immigrant woman, no matter what her educational qualifications or length of residence in this country, becomes a citizen by the act of her husband or father’s naturalization. This means in eleven states of the Union that she can vote at all elections. But immigrant women are very generally years behind the men in Americanization. They lack not only the social assimilation which makes them fit to vote, but even the technical requirements for citizenship, which their husbands or fathers have at least mastered. And yet of 3,723,971 possible women voters in the suffrage states, 902,129 are foreign born--one quarter of the whole number. Of late a number of our western suffragist leaders have assured us that the immigrant woman makes a good voter--that she is conscientious about going to the polls, and seems to take a direct and personal interest in registering her opinion on matters that she knows to affect the welfare of her home, her husband, her children. But there are many thousands of immigrant women in this country who have not mastered the English language in even a small degree, who have had no opportunity to learn our civic ideals, whose homes are not American homes. The thing that concerns us is not that this vote of immigrant women will corrupt our political situation. It is rather to lament that so much civic force and interest, of inestimable value in political rating, is lost to the community and to the nation.