Nor can you judge by parlors and "parlor sets." To the girl who dreams of honest marriage, it pays to buy a parlor sofa on which she may be courted by her true swain, even though the kitchen be stripped to deck that parlor. And tenements to the ambitious father, a good-appearing tenement is more than wellplumbed drains. Babies that die can be replaced, the mother losing only a few days from "going out washing"; but if we descend a round of the social ladder, nowhere so carefully graded as among the poor, well nigh impossible is the ascent.

For these and similar reasons, there is always more want in western cities than first appears. And sometimes the superficial philanthropist will tell you, therefore, that there is no want, and that the cry of poverty is "overworked." Or if he study a little more carefully, he will assure you that the only poor are "frauds." Fraudulent poverty is noisy, and hence first forces itself upon the attention of amateur philanthropists. Many a well-meaning heart has been misled by these upper crusts of appearances and of fraud into thinking that there is no poverty, even where a deeper penetration could reveal sorrow, that would bring ache to the stoutest heart, and pause to the most reckless optimism.

I remember how once, before the scales had wholly fallen from my own eyes, in Boston, I had called for months upon a family, before discovering by careful investigation that their larder had been long more empty than their one room, which I had gradually seen stripped. The father, having no trade for which invention had left him any use, could not get work, and I could not find it for him. The family lived on what the mother, a brave little English woman with two babies under three, earned by taking in what washing she could get. As I went to obtain the help they had not asked for, between my curses on the system which gives thousands too much work, and thousands no work at all, and my "sentiment," the "correct" phrase for pity,- for the thin, thin children, I found time to thank God that I was a Socialist, and not a defender of the present.

Old men sewing pants at fourteen cents a pair; children of four and five, doing basting; women, pale, thin, and diseased, because for months they have only eaten what was left of the scanty meal after the children were first fed; these are common sights in not the poorest section of our city; but they will not usually be seen by the regulation associated-charity-inspectors of the poor. They are usually in homes that never ask for help. True poverty is silent; such persons do not usually die directly of starvation. Hence we are told there is no destitution in Boston. They have the "necessities of life." God pity the blasphemy of what we regard as necessary to life. But how do these people live? This is the question. What wealthy man

or associated-charity-agent would dare to read God's column of "causes of death"?

There is money enough in the various charitable societies of Boston. There is more than can be used, we are told in whisper. But when you go to the agents of these societies, you cannot usually get relief. It is not the agent's fault; the agents are often kind of heart. But "rules" prevent. Most actual cases run up against some "rule." If only human lives could be made to suit these "rules."

Undoubtedly, the one great evil of city life is lack of employment. It does not exist for girls and boys. There is a demand for girls; you cannot get a house-slave, "help"-seeking, "help"-harassed lady, because there is a demand for girls in shops. and factories. For boys there is demand as well. Our great stores employ boys till they become men and want men's wages; then they discharge such, and take new boys. It is not the fault of the storekeepers. It is one of the beautiful fruits of holy competition. Boys and girls will sell themselves cheaper than men. It is men who are out of work.

But not upon these lines do I find the truest cases of destitution in modern life. The editor of this magazine asks me to state especially such cases as have come under my own observation. I can in simple honesty only reply that the most destitute man I have happened to meet in Boston lived in the Back Bay, not in South Boston. He lacked the first necessities of life, which I take to be not good food and shelter, for even a Son of God can be sheltered in a stable-but love and soul. This man seemed only a soulless purse. He was not a type of the wealthy, I am glad to add. His was an extreme case, but does he not show the dangers? Is it not the fact that those of the wealthy who are generous and charitable and given to all good works are usually those who have inherited or been bred in wealth, or have married, or have made wealth by investments, in land for example, that has kept them personally from the defilement of themselves, bargaining and pushing for dollars? Are not our hardest men often our " selfmade men," who by hard work have earned a little money forty or fifty years ago, and since then have nursed it by investments, but who forget that now the beginner has small chance and that even inventors must sell inventions to capitalists to push or to set one side?

Are not these men who have no eye save for the dollar, no ear save for quotations of the market, no heart save for exchange, the truly destitute in Boston? Says Prof. Bryce: "In no country [but America] does one find so many men of eminent capacity for business, so uninteresting, so intellectually barren outside the sphere of their business knowledge."

This is the crying evil of our day, our worst materialism. Fifty years ago hours of work were longer; rewards of work were less, but work was free-employer and employee were social, often intellectual equals; above all, work was certain; industry meant sure success. To-day work is uncertain; success is a peradventure; anxiety is on the brow of the rich and poor alike. In this struggle simply to hold one's own, the poor lose all strength for nobler thought; each child is taught to live above all else for the dollar; family life grows feeble; family love, a myth; the street is the children's home.

Among the successful in business, the French epigram "born a man, and died a grocer" becomes "born a man and died a banker," "born a child of God and died an annex to a counting machine." Is there not a growing material and more deadly soul destitution in modern life? I am optimistic only because I see a growing cure for all this evil.

W. D. P. BLISS.

NOTES ON LIVING PROBLEMS OF THE HOUR.

OBJECTIONS TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE CONSIDERED.

MR. FROTHINGHAM, in the July ARENA, tells why he opposes woman suffrage. His first reason is that woman, in her present political condition, exerts "power" instead of "force." He would conserve this power by witholding the suffrage. But is it the want of force that gives woman power? It would not seem to be so in business, art, or literature, where the possession of such elements of force as are enjoyed by men, is attended with no loss of her peculiar power as woman. Weakness may elicit pity, but it can scarcely create power. Our observation is, that the political impotence of women is more likely to provoke a sneer from the practical politician, and scornful treatment of her just requests, than to fill him with a reverential sense of her "power."

If we are to look for the sources of woman's power in her womanly nature and peculiar relations, then, if suffrage rob her of her power, it must be from its effect on her nature and relations. Now, if woman may vote and still retain her distinguishing qualities of true womanhood, it is evident that she may vote without impairment of her fitness to sustain all her present relations. The danger is evidently felt to lie in the anticipated effect of voting on her womanly nature.

It is intimated by Mr. Frothingham, that the practice of politics is not ennobling. Suffrage educates in chicanery, cunning, the art of party management, and in making a market for manhood. Now, this is either a tendency inseparable from popular suffrage, or one characteristic of the present régime. If voting necessarily corrupts, it had better be abolished altogether. For if the inevitable tendency of popular government is fatal to manhood, it is subversive of government itself, since popular government

cannot exist after manhood is

gone.

If moral decay and political corruption are not necessary results of popular suffrage, then it may be that the evils complained of are more or less due to the fact that, as yet, the state is not organized and governed on the theory of the civilized home, but on that of the savage tribe. The balance of moral forces may have been lost, by the refusal to grant to certain elements of "power" the quality of “force.”

It is not certain that the only result of the ballot in woman's hands would be her degradation. It might be the elevation of politics. At any rate, in this direction seems to lie the only hope for the moral safety of woman. Because, if exclusive male suffrage, as is contended, degrades man, it must also degrade woman. Woman will not escape by being denied the suffrage. That we can have a corrupted manhood and an uncorrupted womanhood is a dream. To have the low browed, coarse grained, false and venal in authority in the state, and exclude its influence from the home, is to cover the land with malaria and keep it out of our houses. If women are not to be defiled with that mire, that mire must be dried up. For it is not necessary that they wade in the mire, only that they walk arm in arm with those who do. If, therefore, women are to be saved from the corruptions of politics, it must be through the purification of politics, whether they vote

or not.

But if politics will not purify themselves, and men alone refuse to purify them, then the only thing left is for woman to attempt it, by hazarding some of her superior, but endangered, moral excellence, in the earnest, if desperate, undertaking of saving her entire moral inheritance.

Another reason for keeping the suffrage from women is the predominance in them of feeling. It is feared that feeling would work disaster in practical politics, which should be dominated by sagacity. But would not more of feeling and less of sagacity be an advantage in politics? May it not be true that the vice of practical politics is the banishment of feeling, and the autocracy of sagacity? This can scarcely be doubted when a prominent political chief avows the principle that, as in war, so all is fair in politics; that to win being the object, how to win is the question, and the answer is, no matter how. When sagacity ceases to regard moral distinctions, it has ceased to be sagacity, and is a far more mischievous and unsafe guide than feeling.

The introduction of feeling, as a permanent factor, might prove a prophylactic against certain too evident tendencies of "practical politics." Indeed we can but believe that it is because politics has become an arena from which feeling is excluded, that it has become a mart on which honor is for sale. Those periods in our political history which most abounded in feeling, are most pure and illustrious. Mr. Frothingham, while deprecating the advent of feeling into politics, seems to us to concede its usefulness there. For he says that the feminine feeling is invaluable as an influence on society. But politics is a phase of social life, and a quality that is invaluable in one department of society cannot be an evil in another. It may be less useful, but it is not harmful.