difference between what we might more correctly call long-range and short-range practicality.

What we usually speak of as practical would correspond to what I here speak of as shortrange practicality. It means a readiness to meet the immediate occasion as is dictated by the momentary desire. Such practicality is a perpetual meeting of emergencies. It is a sort of living from hand to mouth, an uninspired and unillumined opportunism. That which is ordinarily condemned as unpractical, and which is unpractical from this narrow standpoint, may now be called long-range practicality. That is to say, it is that prevision, that thorough intellectual equipment, that wisdom as to the ultimate and comparative worth of things, without which there can be no security nor any confirming sense of genuine achievement. It is that which makes the difference between making a fool of oneself, however earnestly or even successfully, and living in a manner which would be able to endure the test of time.

XII

THE CONDESCENDING MAN AND THE

OBSTRUCTIVE WOMAN

AN the free man, in keeping with his code

CAN

of freedom, deny that prerogative to women? It is a very personal matter, and as public issues go, a relatively simple matter. Let us put it as concretely as possible. Your neighbor has asked that her voice be heard and that her will be counted in deciding some matter of general neighborhood policy, such, for example, as the construction of a new street. It so happens that this particular neighbor has a very lively interest in the matter, being, let us say, the owner of property through which the projected street would pass. She asks you to consent to some change of procedure that will enable her to represent her own interest and to have her will count as one among the rest. Your first impulse is to smile-the outward expression of your feeling of incongruity. Such a smile is the restrained way of manifesting that delicate derision with

which irregularity is greeted by the perfectly habituated. It is what remains when civilization has refined away the boorish laughter with which the natural man condemns a breach of custom or departure from the familiar type. You have been used to settling affairs with men whose wives you have met only in those lighter pastimes known as "society."

But after the first shock the realities of the situation press upon you. Your neighbor's request is irresistibly natural and reasonable. Unless you are a trained casuist you will not hesitate to admit her "right" to be heard and counted. It will come over you that her sex, while it affects the amenities and proprieties, has nothing to do with the merits of her claim. Has she a vital interest in the outcome? Has she a matured opinion? Is she capable of discussion? Then what under heaven has her sex to do with it? Thus qualified she has made good her title to rule among the rest, even though she is a daughter of Eve. You will have no difficulty in recalling the names of several sons of Adam whose qualifications are more doubtful, but whose title is not challenged because it has been thought less dangerous to enfranchise one hundred whose title is doubtful than to disfranchise one whose title is

clear. Better excessive liberality than the suspicion of tyranny.

Out of such reflections as these, if you are honest-minded and more concerned with the substance than with the form of the thing, there will grow a recognition of your neighbor as fellow-citizen. You will come to see that rights and interests and reasoned conviction are neither masculine nor feminine. You may even accustom your eyes to petticoats at the council-table, and your ear to the close succession of the words "votes" and "women." The impulse to smile may be forgotten in an unself-conscious effort to work out the common good. You will have found an association of minds and purposes where at first you saw only a bit of comedy. And when you meet your neighbor in that conference in which she registers her will among the rest, you may even have so far regained your composure as to be able to rehat.

move your

This, then, is the question. It is a neighborhood question between one human being and another. There are no immutable political axioms from which it can be argued. All of its realities, and all of the evidence that is germane and decisive are to be found in the concrete situation in which human interests and human minds

are associated. To grasp the larger and vaguer issue, you must reduce it in scale and express it in terms of your own immediate community. "Rights" come into existence when human beings assert them and other human beings acknowledge them. The rights of women are now in the making; they are being generated by the natural and irresistible growth of practises and ideas to which we have long been committed. You cannot deny your neighbor; no man can deny his neighbor. In your act of acknowledgment your neighbor acquires a right; by such an acknowledgment repeated a million times, a whole social class is enfranchised.

This is a question between men and women, not between Man and Woman. Each individual must translate it for himself into terms of his own personal relations. Recall to mind the wisest and best woman of your acquaintance. Forget convention and legalized usage, and remember only that she has interests as genuine as yours, purposes as broad and benevolent, and opinions that to her seem true even as do yours to you. She wishes to participate in the regulation of public policies in a community that is assumed to be self-governing. She possesses interests that belong to the community of interests