The constitution of the new Republic of Portugal gave “universal” suffrage, and Dr. Beatrice Angelo applied for registration, which was refused.  She carried her case to the courts, her demand was sustained, and she cast her vote.  It was too late for other women to register, but an organization of 1,000 women was at once formed to secure definite action of Parliament, with the approval of President Braga and several members of his cabinet.

The Spanish Chamber has proposed to give women heads of families in the villages a vote for mayor and council.

A bill to give suffrage to women was recently introduced in the Parliament of Persia, but was ruled out of order by the president because the Koran says women have no souls.

Siam has lately adopted a constitution which gives women a municipal vote.

The leaders of the revolution in China have promised suffrage for women if it is successful.

Several women voted in place of their husbands at the recent election in Mexico.  Belize, the capital of British Honduras, has just given the right to women to vote for town council.

Throughout the entire world is an unmistakable tendency to accord woman a voice in the government, and, strange to say, this is stronger in monarchies than in republics.  In Europe the republics of France and Switzerland give almost no suffrage to women.  Norway and Finland, where they have the complete franchise; Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Great Britain, where they have all but the parliamentary, and that close at hand, are monarchies.  New Zealand and Australia, where women are fully enfranchised, are dependencies of a monarchical government.

JANE ADDAMS

The comfortable citizen possessing a vote won for him in a previous generation, who is so often profoundly disturbed by the cry of “Votes for Women,” seldom connects the present attempt to extend the franchise with those former efforts, as the results of which he himself became a member of the enfranchised class.  Still less does the average voter reflect that in order to make self-government a great instrument in the hands of those who crave social justice, it must ever be built up anew in relation to changing experiences, and that unless this readjustment constantly takes place self-government itself is placed in jeopardy.

Yet the adherents of representative government, with its foundations laid in diversified human experiences, must concede that the value of such government bears a definite relation to the area of its base and that the history of its development is merely a record of new human interests which have become the subjects of governmental action, and the incorporation into the government itself of those classes who represented the new interests.