than could many a Cathayan cycle. The growth of religious liberty,
enlargement of foreign and home missions, the Temperance movement, the
giant war waged for principle, are among the causes of this change. The
settlement of the great West, the opening of professions and trades to
woman consequent upon the loss of more than a half million of the nation's
most stalwart men, the mechanical inventions that have changed home and
trade conditions, the sudden advance of science, the expansion of mind and
of work that are fostered by the play of a free government,--all these
have tended to place man and woman, but especially woman, where something
like a new heaven and a new earth are in the distant vision.

To this change the Suffragists call attention, and say, "This is, in great
part, our work." In this little book I shall recount a few of the facts
that, in my opinion, go to prove that the Suffrage movement has had but
little part or lot in this matter. And because of these facts I believe
the principles on which the claim to suffrage is founded are those that
turn individuals and nations backward and not forward.

The first proof I shall mention is the latest one in time--it is the fact
of an Anti-Suffrage movement. In the political field alone are we being
formed into separate camps whose watchwords become more unlike as they
become more clearly understood. The fact that for the first time in our
history representatives of two great organizations of women are appealing
to courts and legislatures, each begging them to refuse the prayer of the
other, shows, as conclusively as a long argument could do, that this
matter of suffrage is something essentially distinct from the great series
of movements in which women thus far have advanced side by side. It is an
instinctive announcement of a belief that the demand for suffrage is not
progress; that it does array sex against sex; that woman, like man, can
advance only as the race advances; and that here lies the dividing line.