However that may be, I have merely to meet the objection that women are so incompetent that their participation in politics would endanger the welfare of the State. To meet the point I do not need to range the records of history, nor to dwell on the significant contrast of England under her three Queens and her dozens of Kings. The reply is simple. Precisely the same objection was raised to the extension of the franchise in 1832 and in 1868, and it was just as plausible. Men who had been excluded from the slightest influence on political affairs from all time had no incentive whatever to study them. No sooner were their minds quickened by a suffrage agitation, and their responsibility aroused by the concession of the vote, than they entered keenly upon political themes and developed a normal political judgment. There is not the slightest ground to assume that the present political apathy of the mass of women has any other cause, and will not disappear when they are invited or permitted to exercise their dormant powers. It is not judgment, but the material of judgment--knowledge--that women lack. This knowledge of political issues they not only had no incentive or motive to acquire, but public opinion positively discouraged them from acquiring. Wherever the vote has been given the competence has been proved at once. A century ago men were just as convinced that woman was incompetent to work in the score of industries and professions in which she works with success to-day. The case is, therefore, that while those who urge the incompetence of woman have not a shred of evidence to rely upon--beyond the ridiculous and futile practice of referring us to some woman or group of women they have met--those who believe in her competence have an immense and increasing body of experience, besides the plain probabilities of the situation. We have opened a hundred doors to women, and have discovered a hundred aptitudes that men had not suspected. Communities amounting in the aggregate to eleven or twelve million souls have admitted women to the parliamentary franchise, and the result has been admirable. Larger countries, including England, have admitted women to a share in other branches of public life (local government), and no evils have been reported. To say that our women are not competent to take the further step of choosing once in five or seven years which party should be returned to power, which of two candidates they prefer as their representative, is either a piece of wanton cynicism or an insincere cloak for an obstinate prejudice. And for those who view with complacency the enlisting of thousands of women in the service of political parties, and their active employment in electoral battles, the position is intolerable.