In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a result of hereditary privilege.  Local affairs in England, until a very recent period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish.  It was really property interests and not people who voted.  Those women who owned property, or who were administering property for their minor children, were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense the Poor Laws.  Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right of municipal franchise.  It carries with it a property qualification, and the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England are making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property qualification.

The real position, legal and social, which women in England and continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say Germany.  The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels.  And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have somewhat been loosened.

A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a group of women in Leipzig formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German Women.  The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea of the position of women at that time.  The women demanded as their rights, Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession.  Nothing more, but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests.  Needless to say nothing came of the women’s demand.

After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women’s revolt naturally moved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin.  From that city, during the years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in 1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demand for absolute equality with men.  Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer and Anita Augsberg, the latter unmarried and a doctor of laws, were the moving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has since extended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small town without its suffrage club.

Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American suffragist in that she is always a member of a political party.  She is a silent member to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, through tradition or conviction, she believes in its policies.  Usually the suffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to the International Socialist Party.  She is a suffragist because she is a Socialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed,