of the clauses promoted by the Government was "that all the higher-paid posts in the Civil Service will continue to be reserved to men." These Orders in Council will have to be closely scrutinized. Nevertheless, when we remember that between 1902 and 1914 only two really important Acts bearing specially upon the welfare and status of women had been passed—namely, the Midwives Act, 1902, and the group of Acts, dating from 1907 to 1914, dealing with the qualification of women as candidates in local elections—and that since the passing of the Reform Act of 1918 at least seven important measures effecting large improvements in the status of women have rapidly gone through all their stages in both Houses of Parliament, we shall not be slow to appreciate the fact that the women's vote has made a very big difference indeed. The Act which rendered women eligible for Parliament, introduced in the Commons late in the autumn Session of 1918, went through both Houses in about a fortnight. In the Lords it was adopted without opposition. Not of great importance in itself, but significant in its implications, was the quiet removal of the heavy grille of the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons in the summer of 1918, and the opening to women on equal terms of the Strangers' Gallery. Part of the grille has been preserved for the London Museum, and part will be kept in the House itself. It may be hoped that it will be put up in some appropriate place, with waxen dummies behind it revelling in the Oriental seclusion which recommended it to the Commons for about seventy years. One great discomfort of the grille was that the interstices of the heavy brass work were not large enough to allow the victims who sat behind it to focus it so that both eyes looked through the same hole. It was like using a gigantic pair of spectacles which did not fit, and made the Ladies' Gallery a grand place for getting headaches. Suffragists are not labouring under the impression that because women now have votes no further reform is needed in our representative system. A large proportion of suffragists are probably in favour of proportional representation, and would favour its adoption mainly on the ground that it would secure a much fairer reflection of the whole nation than the present system, which may, and frequently does, result in the practical exclusion from representation of large masses of the voters. A good deal of education and spade work in spreading the principles of proportional representation are necessary on this and other important reforms, but now that women form a very considerable portion of the electorate they have at least the satisfaction of knowing that their views on this and other important political issues count for something, and are actually studied and considered, so that things work out much more rapidly than ever before in the direction they desire.