It is characteristic of the fashion in which the surface gains our attention while the substance evades it, that the question of the disproportion of the sexes should have been brought to the public notice in regard to a subject which, though not unimportant, is quite secondary compared with those which we are now discussing. Only three or four years ago people were startled and incredulous when one told them by the pen or in lectures that there was a very great excess of women in these islands. Nowadays everybody knows it. This is not because people have suddenly come to realize the fundamental importance for the State of such matters, but simply because the fact provides an argument regarding Woman Suffrage. This immensely important fact of female preponderance, with its gigantic consequences, which affect every aspect of the national life, was totally ignored by the public until, forsooth, it became an argument against Woman Suffrage; and then the foolish people whose voices are allowed to be heard on these complicated matters, but who would be laughed out of court if they expressed their opinions on other subjects equally outside their competence, told us that woman's suffrage would mean government by women, they being in the majority. For all other consequences of this gigantic fact they have no concern; not even the mental capacity to grasp that it must have consequences. But this, which happens not to be a consequence of it, they are loud to insist upon. At any rate, they have done this service until the public at last is acquainted with the demographic fact; and one of the suffragist leaders some time ago publicly expressed an old argument of the present writer's that in point of fact this grave supposed consequence of woman's suffrage need not be feared if only for the reason that Woman Suffrage would certainly mean increased attention to infant mortality, and therefore increased control of the morbid causes which at present account for female preponderance.