I should be glad, however, to ask Professor Patten in return to consider more carefully the nature of certain “small coercions” against which the women of the country and the social workers as well are now protesting. Professor Patten contrasts the value of a “suffragette agitation” with the value of a “clearer vision.” He cannot, however, be ignorant of the fact that the efforts of women to become politically free have revealed as no other agency has been able to do, the nature and extent of the coercion exercised over the voters of the community by the organized forces of vice and alcohol. The women think that, in their efforts to secure political freedom so that they may be able to serve the community, they should have Professor Patten’s acquiescence in increased control exercised over these common foes of the race. In Professor Patten’s judgment the “only effective check to the natural expansion of clear ideas and social emotions is offered by the members of the degenerate, defective or dependent classes.” Commercialized alcohol and vice may be included in these groups; but will the classifications likewise include the competitor who remains in the market by adulterating the food supply of the people, the unintelligent producers of unclean and unsafe milk, the employer of children in the southern cotton mills, those who fatten on the labor of underpaid girls in our department stores and factories? I fancy these “enemies of the people” would be greatly surprised to find themselves so classified. Nor is the strength of their position or the disastrous consequences of their freedom lessened by so characterizing them. “Little coercions” upon them mean “large doses of freedom” to the child, the women workers, the men helpless before conditions of physical hazard in our industrial establishments. Political action without philanthropy is of course like the human skeleton equipped perhaps with muscle but lacking the nervous and circulatory systems. Philanthropy on the other hand without political capacity is like an invertebrate structure, inert and incapable of efficient self-direction. It seems entirely in accord with her general experience of helplessness when relying on philanthropy alone and with her observation of the social aimlessness of the older political parties that Miss Addams should demand that the strength and stability of one be added to the life and persistence of the other. CHAPTER VIII CORRECTIONS