In this conflicting testimony it does not appear that the complaint of Lucretia Mott and her sister suffragists in 1848 that woman had been oppressed on all sides is valid to-day. Both Miss Bronson and her suffragist opponents agree that woman in industry has been protected, not oppressed. It is admitted that this is not a result of the exercise of the ballot by woman. It is unfortunate, of course, that the suffrage states are in the agricultural and mining stages of civilization, and cannot show how formidable the women's vote might be in correcting the oppressive man-made laws. It is a little deplorable, too, that the women in the male-suffrage states should have spent so much of their time proving that protective laws might be gotten by the despised indirect methods. Dr. Abbott and Professor Breckinridge have perceived this tactical error, and they note it in these words:
American women would probably have got the vote long ago if they had followed the present English method of making suffrage a paramount issue, first, last, and all the time. Instead of this, Miss Jane Addams in Illinois, Mrs. Florence Kelley in New York, and a host of other ardent suffragists have labored with the greatest devotion and self-sacrifice to secure protective legislation for women and children. How much effort they have put into it, how much time and energy it has cost, only those who have been closely associated with them know. It should not be forgotten that, as the result of their experience, they say that the ballot is the swiftest and surest way to bring about the reforms which are asked by and for the women workers of the country.
But how can that last sentence be verified? Was it not explicitly admitted that the suffrage states, by reason of their mining and agricultural status, have had little occasion to reform the laws for women workers, and that the reforms have all been worked out in the east? The male workers under male suffrage have done this for themselves, and incidentally for the women workers among them. Of course, there are fewer woman bread-winners, the proportion being five men to one woman. But women share equally in the benefits of labor legislation, besides being specially protected. The unions have even succeeded in leveling up a little the scale of women's wages, thus measurably meeting the complaint of 1848 that in her employments woman "receives but a scanty remuneration." And despite the equal pay laws for teachers in the suffrage states the average pay for women teachers is much below that of men teachers. Dr. Helen M. Sumner, the suffragist writer of the book Equal Suffrage says: "Taking public employment as a whole, women in Colorado receive considerably less remuneration than men;" and "the wages of men and women in all fields of industry are governed by economic conditions." Dr. Sumner's tables show that the pay of women in Colorado has never been quite half as much as the pay of men; while the average weekly wage of women in that state is 97 cents higher than the average in the United States, the average weekly pay of men is $3.62 higher than for the United States as a whole. Dr. Sumner frankly acknowledges that the suffrage has probably nothing to do with the wages of either men or women.
As for hours of work, the contention of the suffragists that the 54-hour a week law in Massachusetts was "the culmination of forty years of effort by indirect influence to improve conditions for women in industry," while Utah granted such a law after less than two years of effort by its suffragist advocates, merits the comment that the forty years, or one-eighth that time, were not consumed in agitating for this specific bit of legislation. The struggle for the law limiting hours of women's work in Massachusetts lasted a little longer than in Utah, chiefly because Utah is an agricultural state where manufacturers have less at stake in the passage of such a restrictive measure. It is not probable that the legislators of Utah blenched and yielded this point through fear of the women's vote, or that any but humanitarian motives dictated the legislation in either state.
Considerations of humanity, indeed, and not politics, seem to animate the legislative programs for the protection of women and children in most states, whether male suffragist or equal suffragist. Pennsylvania, for example, is one of the black states on the suffragist maps, because it has never extended the franchise to woman, even for the election of school committees. If the woman's vote is requisite, we should see the protective laws of Pennsylvania far behind those of Colorado. Colorado has had equal suffrage since 1893, and of all the woman suffragist states, conditions there are most nearly like those in the male suffragist East. For comparison, I draw on two unchallenged documents, one prepared by Mary C. Bradford and published by the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association—with some additions by Elinor Byrns and Helen Ranlett, printed in The New York Evening Post of Nov. 10, 1913—summarizing the protective laws for women and children passed in that state from 1893 to 1912; the other, a statement of similar laws in force in Pennsylvania in 1912, put forth by the Pennsylvania Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage:
While minor differences exist in this comparison, the picture as a whole does not show that the legislation protective of women and children in Colorado is greatly, if at all, in advance of that in the male-suffrage state of Pennsylvania. The American Vigilance Association calls Pennsylvania's laws on "white slavery" and disorderly houses "good," and Colorado's only "fair." Colorado created in 1913 a Minimum Wage Commission, thus coming abreast of male-suffrage Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania lacks such a commission. But a law establishing a minimum wage is open to the objection that it throws out of employment all who are incapable of earning that wage. It does not protect them in industry, it simply throws them upon the streets, thence to find their way into jails and poorhouses. Designed as a protective measure, it has yet to vindicate that purpose, and it seems to be adopted irrespective of the votes of women. Aside from this it seems clear that if there is any essential difference between the protective legislation of Colorado and Pennsylvania, it must lie in the degree with which the women's votes compel enforcement of the laws.
But just how effective do the suffragists themselves feel the women's vote to be in securing redress for their injuries? Do they trust it? Their chief grievance is the deprivation of the suffrage. The American Woman Suffrage Association says of this, nevertheless, that while woman must have the ballot on every other question, she cannot be trusted to wield it in deciding this most vital question of legal privilege; that only an electorate of men is qualified to decide it. The association is convinced that every improvement in woman's position thus far has been secured "not by a general demand from the majority of women, but by the arguments, entreaties and 'continual coming' of a persistent few." In the association's Brief History of the suffrage movement it contends that the beneficial changes of the last half century in the laws, written and unwritten, relating to women have necessarily come by the influence of a few men and women. "Not one of them would have been made to this day if it had been necessary to wait until the majority of women asked for it," the association says. But that is an argument against the extension of the suffrage, which works only by majorities!
It is a valid argument, and it has historical facts in its support. Massachusetts in 1895 granted woman the right to vote on the question whether the municipal suffrage should be extended without distinction of sex. The suffragists made a vigorous campaign in that state. Only 4 per cent. of the women cared to go to the polls and record an affirmative vote. When human grievances have become intolerable, men have been willing to shed blood for their redress. This grievance of the suffragists cannot be very widespread or keenly felt, when they fail to persuade the women even to signify their protest.
She that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much. Mrs. George, speaking for the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, has presented to the woman suffrage committee of the Federal Senate the record of seventeen years' voting for school committees by the women of Massachusetts. During that time the registration showed but 4.8 per cent. of all the women of the state who were qualified to register and vote, and 2.1 per cent., less than one-half of them, actually got to the polls. Mrs. George obtained from the town clerk of Dedham, Mass., the official list of male and female voters in that town from 1889 to 1912, which shows a steadily diminishing female vote from 154 in 1889 to 1 in 1903; since 1903 not one of the fifty to seventy women registered in Dedham has remembered to go to the polls on Election Day.
If women cannot be expected to look after the interests of their children's schooling, how can they be expected to be faithful in the general field of politics? The Massachusetts State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage has compiled the total vote cast in the Presidential election of 1912 in the six woman suffrage States of California, Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho, and Utah—1,521,590 out of a total possible vote of 3,200,152—showing that only 47-1/2 per cent. of men and women in those states cared to go to the polls for the most interesting of all elections; comparing this with the 1,587,984 male votes cast out of a possible 2,295,119 votes—69 per cent. of the total—in the six non-suffrage western states of Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, Nevada, South Dakota, and Missouri. Now if 69 per cent. of the men voted in the woman suffrage states in 1912, then only 17.8 per cent. of the women voters in those states actually cast their ballots. At any rate, it is certain that the extension of suffrage to women results in a notable decrease of the actual voting strength of the electorate, as compared with the more healthy interest in voting shown by the electorates of the non-suffrage states. In that same Presidential election of 1912, Secretary of State Jordan of California reports that 802,000 men and but 180,000 women registered to vote—over 93 per cent. of the men, and a trifle over 27 per cent. of the women who were qualified to register and vote. In the election in Pasadena on March 20, 1913, deciding bond issues, some of them for parks and playgrounds, only 4,672 men and women cast ballots out of a voting population of 16,324; in Los Angeles four days later, the Citizens' Committee's vigorous campaign advocating the carrying of certain propositions and defeat of others ended in a vote of 31,000 men and women, while 130,000 qualified voters of both sexes stayed away. Although 45,665 women registered out of 121,000 women qualified to register and vote in San Francisco's local option election in 1913, the votes of only 15,087, both men and women, were cast in favor of the amendment. In all the elections of which there are records of men and women voting, the women manifest less interest both in registering and in voting than the men.
This fact has its vital bearing on the question of law enforcement. If elected officials fail to enforce the law, the only corrective is the ballot. Dr. Abbott and Professor Breckinridge, answering Miss Bronson's statement that thirty-nine states compel employers in stores, factories, and shops to provide seats for female employés, say that in most of the states where voteless women have got such laws they have never had the means of enforcing them. But if the extension of the elective franchise to the women of these states should mean the lowering of the total vote from 69 per cent. to but 47-1/2 per cent. of the possible vote, what prospect is there that the laws will be better enforced under woman suffrage? Judge Ben B. Lindsey of Colorado, himself a suffragist by propinquity, testified in 1910 that his battle with "the Beast" and "the System" in that state was begun without the help of the women leaders who at national meetings had been telling how much the women had done for the juvenile court in Denver. They dared not help him, Judge Lindsey said, and women like Mary C. Bradford and Mrs. Lafferty, a member of the Legislature, "took the platform against me and supported the System." He added:
If anyone believes that woman's suffrage is a panacea for all the evils of our political life, he does not know what those evils are. The women are as free of the power of the Beast as the men are, and no freer.... In a typical American community such as ours, where the Beast rules, the women are as helpless as the rest of us.... Their leaders in politics are politicians; when they get their nominations from corporation machines they do the work of the corporations; and there is almost no way under the Beast to get a party nomination except from a corporation machine. Women in politics are human beings; they are not "ministering angels" of an ethereal ideality; and they are unable to free us, because they are not free themselves.
Mrs. Nora Blatch DeForest has tried to show by tables that woman's voting benefits women and children in the passage of laws fixing the "age of consent" for girls; in fixing the age under which the consent of parent or guardian is necessary for marriage; the age below which employment of children in factories is prohibited; the maximum length of a day's work for children, and the hours within which women may work in factories. The tabulation includes the more recent suffrage states of Arizona, California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington, in which most of the beneficial laws enumerated were passed under male suffrage. In them and in Utah—excepting the four other suffrage states where there are no limiting laws for women's work—the average day's labor for women is 9.2 hours in the ten suffrage states as against 9.9 hours in the nineteen partial suffrage states, and 10.1 hours in the nineteen non-suffrage states. The maximum day's work for a child is 8.6 hours in the suffrage states, 9 hours in the partial suffrage states, and 9.5 hours in the non-suffrage states, while the ages for prohibited child labor are 14.3 years, 14.1 years, and 13.3 years, respectively. In the same order, the ages at which the consent of parent or guardian is required for marriage of young women are 18.9 years, 19.3 years, and 19.1 years, respectively, and the ages at which girls may consent to their own ruin are 17.5 years, 16.6 years, and 15 years in the three groups of states.
Now, if populations be considered in these three groups, instead of political divisions merely, it will be found that only 5,193,116 people in the suffrage states of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Kansas are under the law which fixes the ideal "age of consent" at 18; that 6,229,263 people are under this beneficent law in the non-suffrage states of Florida, Missouri, and Tennessee, and 17,161,100 people have passed this law in the partial suffrage states of Delaware, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, and Wisconsin; it should be observed, too, that the women voters in the partial suffrage states—less than 5 per cent. of those women vote, by the way—have nothing to do with electing the men who passed this and the other laws discussed by Mrs. DeForest. Like proportions of population hold with respect to all the laws passed in the three classes of states; taking the best law in each case, it may be shown that more people have it under male suffrage than under equal suffrage.
Thus far this article must seem disappointing to sincere suffragists for it reads like an "anti" document. In the length and breadth of this Union there are no distinctive results of woman suffrage where it has been granted in part or in whole.
But there are abundant results of the feminist movement. In agitating for the ballot Lucretia Mott and her fellow and sister suffragists builded better than they knew. In not following the English method of making suffrage a paramount issue "first, last, and all the time," they and the latter-day suffragists have rapidly brought to pass the feminist reforms, including the extension of the suffrage to women. They have not played the shrew like the English militants, and they are making greater headway than the militants. In this country the redress of woman's grievances has come ante hoc and cum hoc—not post hoc, and hardly ever propter hoc—with respect to woman's suffrage. The cases of California and Washington, the male-elected legislatures of which gave to women workers eight-hour laws at the same time they granted them the suffrage, are fairly typical; "indirect influence" accomplished both results.
Whether the vote in woman's hands may ultimately be better utilized; whether she may use it to aid in freeing the men voters from their thraldom to long ballots and the bosses, with the result of giving both sexes the direct influence on their government that they both lack—that is a question quite beyond the scope of this article.
The baby lay in her carriage looking up at the over-hanging soft green leaves and white flowers of a lilac bush. A light wind came rather chilly from the north, despite the day of blue sky and flooding sunshine, and so the carriage had been wheeled a little around a south corner of the house, and left there. Baby was alone with her thumbs and fingers, her big wide eyes and the warm sunshine and her busy little brain. She was a baby of early mental development. Her parents thought her in the way to be a genius.
In the white flowers among the soft green leaves of the lilac bush busy worker bees foraged. They worked actively in the warm sunshine, some lapping up with long tongues of marvelous complexity the nectar from the open flowerets, while others loaded their thighs with the sticky yellowish pollen. They came and went between the flowers and their distant hive, each one doing its own work unaided and unhindered and even apparently unnoticed by any other.
The baby watched them with big wide eyes, uncomprehending, for nature study had not yet come into her curriculum. She liked their activity though, and more than once put up her tiny hands uncertainly as if to feel or grasp them.
Suddenly one of the bees, with the pollen baskets on its thighs filled to overflowing, dropped down on to the knitted afghan that covered the baby's body below the arms. It staggered about a moment, buzzed its wings violently without being able to fly, and then resignedly stood still with legs outspread and wings occasionally gently vibrating. The baby's eyes, soon tired of staring up into the too bright sky, turned their attention to her wriggling thumbs, and, a moment after, discovered the tired bee. She put out one hand suddenly toward it.
"Excuse me," said the bee, "but I wouldn't touch me if I were you."
"Why?" asked the baby, "shall I hurt you?"
"No, but I should have to hurt you," answered the bee gently.
"You? You little thing hurt me? That's rather absurd, isn't it?"
"Much littler things than I can hurt much bigger things than you," said the bee, sententiously. "But, really, don't you know what I am, and what I can do?"
"No, pardon me for my stupid ignorance, but I do not. I seem to have seen a picture in one of my father's books that resembles you; but it was labelled Apis mellifica, and that told me very little."
"Oh! yes, that was me," proudly replied the bee. "That is what I am called in books. But outdoors here my name is Bee, Honeybee."
"Thank you, Bee. And my name is Baby. I also have another name; in fact several other names. But I rather prefer Baby. It relieves me of much responsibility, and gives me certain powers that my other names fail to carry with them. May I ask if you read much?"
"I do not read at all," answered the bee, "I do not need to," it added. "I know all that I need to know when I am born."
"You mean that you do not have to study, to study books, long rows of books, in order to know how to live?" asked the baby in surprise. "If so then it is no wonder that my father writes about you as he does; that he says you are the example for us all; and that you and your cousins the, er, Formicidae...."
"Oh, the ants, yes. That we are ...?"
"That you are the true successes among all the animals because your knowledge has led you to establish the perfect society, and to become the only true communists among them all. He says that your life should be the guide for ours; that when we human beings can thoroughly adopt your ways we shall have solved all our problems."
"How wonderfully you talk!" interrupted the bee. "I suppose that comes from reading. You do read a lot, I suppose?"
"Well, I am making a beginning, yes," answered the baby with a sigh. "But it is discouraging sometimes. Here I've only just got through the Encyclopedia Britannica and now they have turned out a new edition. But I get a great deal of my knowledge of life from hearing my father and mother talk; and my nurse, she is a very superior person, too."
"Your father writes books? He is a literary man, then?" asked the bee.
"Oh, no; not at all. He is a scientific man. He writes books only because he has such important things to tell the people."
"And he writes about me and my cousins the ants? He tells the people that they should live as we do? Well, that is encouraging. To tell the truth, some of us have rather envied you humans. We have wanted to be like you."
"Oh, that is silly. Anyway, to be like us in our present stage of evolution."
"In your present stage of, of—I am afraid I don't quite understand," said the bee, rubbing one antenna over its face in a rather bewildered way.
"Oh, like us as we are now. We are in a dreadful way just now. We used to have a very good conceit of ourselves. We were even happy. But that was because we were so ignorant of our true condition. We know better now, thanks to my father and some other observant and thoughtful men. They have seen how miserable we are and they are telling everybody about it. That is necessary, you know, in order to change it. They are writing about it in the newspapers, in the magazines, in little books, in big books. Our business, our politics, our government, our society, our religion, our very line of evolution; all wrong. At the bottom of it all there is one great trouble; we are too much interested in ourselves as individuals. We want things for ourselves. We should, of course, only want things for the people of the future. We should live for the race, not the individual; just as you do, you know."
"Why, that's funny! We complain of just the opposite. We don't see why we shouldn't have some good things for ourselves, and not do everything all the time for future bees. Even they won't have a good time for they will have to work for still more future bees."
"But think of the race; the wonderful race to come!" burst in the baby.
"Ah, yes, I suppose. But pardon me, please, I am a little dizzy with all this. You know I dropped down here to die; but I have been so much interested in what you said. However, I am afraid I really must die in a few minutes; and if I don't seem to be particularly bright just now you will understand and excuse me, won't you?" And the bee settled down a little lower on her stiffly outstretched legs, and vibrated both antennae gently as if to take a few last smells of the lilac-fragrant air.
"Why, this is terrible! You poor dear bee. Dying! And you talk of it as if it were nothing! Isn't there something we can do? I will call somebody. All I have to do is to scream once, and somebody will come in a hurry."
"Oh, please don't trouble yourself at all. Dying is of no importance whatever with us, you know. In fact if I am old enough or worn out enough to be weak I have no right to wish to live longer, and it would be wrong for anyone to help me. That is part of our perfect communism, you know. We only live for each other and for the race. And if we are weak or sick—but you know, of course, from hearing your father explain it."
The baby was silent for a moment. Her big, wide eyes, strained even wider now by horror and pity, were fastened on the bee, while it held its own head up as bravely as it could to look steadily into the baby's face. The bee and the baby had someway become friends. Both felt it. And they were silent together, but understanding each other, as friends can.
The baby spoke first. "Dear Bee, if I can't do anything to save you, is there anything I can do"—and a tear rolled down into her mouth—"after?"
"Thank you; you are surprisingly good. Do you really want to do something? Well, if you could someway arrange to see that my load of pollen"—and it moved its two laden hind legs slightly—"gets to the hive, it would be a great favor to me."
"Why, that is dreadful again! You are only thinking of the others. I mean can't I do something just for you, alone?"
The bee did not answer. Her hind legs slid down and out until they were nearly flat on the afghan. Suddenly the baby's face lighted. And with an extraordinary and extremely precocious display of energy and precision of movement—thus beautifully proving the words of that lamented philosopher who said that we ordinarily draw on only about half our resources—she twisted herself around so that her hands could reach the bee, and put them out directly to it.
"Now don't hurt me, the way you said you could," she whispered, "for I am going to help you." And she lifted the bee gently in one hand and with the long sharp nail of the tiny fore finger of the other—a nail the nurse had neglected for several days—she deftly pried the pollen masses off the bee's legs. Then she gently put it down again and twisted back into place, smiling happily.
"There," she said, "that will relieve you of the weight of those horrid great pollen loads. It will help you, I am sure."
It certainly did help the bee. It stood up much higher on its legs than before. It even made a few feeble steps nearer the baby's face. But it did not say anything for a full minute, and when it did speak its voice betrayed its very strong feeling. Its antennae quivered, and its wings lifted and fell spasmodically. It was a much moved bee.
"This is very wonderful; the influence you have over me, Baby," it said. "I ought, by all our tradition and knowledge, to have stung you. I ought to sting every live thing that touches me that doesn't have the nest odor. And you haven't. But you do have a very pleasing smell, someway. Is that the odor of goodness?"
"Why, no, I suppose it's just the bathed baby odor," said the baby. "I had my bath only half an hour ago and was put out here to go to sleep. Only usually I don't go to sleep. Sometimes I lie and think, and sometimes I just lie and feel good."
"And then I shouldn't at all have let you take off my pollen loads," went on the bee, musingly. "If I should be found by any bees after I am dead without any pollen on my legs or nectar in my honey stomach they would think very badly of me indeed. That is," it added a little bitterly, "if they should think anything about me at all. But I can't feel as badly as I ought to, someway. I really feel a great deal better with those loads off. And I thank you for being so good to me."
"I feel much better, too," said the baby, with a beautiful smile and sweet little gurgle. "Better because you are better, and better because I made you better. I don't think either my bath or my bottle makes me feel better. You dear bee, I wish I could always help you."
"Thank you, Baby. If I were really going to live much longer I should always remember your smell, and come to you if I were in trouble."
"Ah," cried the baby, with her eyes dancing, "then you have learned something. You didn't know everything when you were born, after all. I expect it is not too wise to get all one's knowledge from one's ancestors. Probably the world changes, and new things come into it, and one needs to be ready to learn. Now we humans are much newer things than you bees, and there are new things in our lives. That's why my father's science, which explains everything by the old things, has always seemed to me to leave something out of account. What does your father think about it?"
The bee lifted its antennae in surprise. Not having eyelids to open nor eyebrows to lift, a surprised bee can only lift its antennae.
"Why, of course, I don't know what my father thinks. I don't know my father. I haven't even seen him. Or if I have seen him with the others in the hive, I haven't known which one was he. I only know he was one of the strongest and best flying bees in the hive or he would never have been able to marry my mother."
The baby, whose eyes had opened very wide as the bee first began to speak, soon recovered herself, for she remembered what her father had written in the report of one of his committees, the Committee on Eugenics, she thought it was. She had read parts of it one day when the nurse had left her for an hour in her father's study.
"Oh, yes, I had forgotten. Only the biggest and strongest bees can be the fathers of the future bees. And that's about all your father does, isn't it; just be your father."
"Yes, we kill them off after mother begins bearing us," answered the bee simply.
"Gracious, what a dreadful thing to do!"
"Why, not at all. They are all pretty old then. And we strong young bees can do the work much better. In fact they couldn't do the work at all. They would only be extra mouths to bring food for, and extra bodies to give space to in the hive. It is far better for the race to get them out of the way," said the bee.
"But your mother; you know her, don't you? And you don't kill her, I hope?" said the baby anxiously.
"Well, I do know her, but she doesn't know me. You see when one does nothing but bear children, and has twenty or thirty thousand of them, and more, all very much alike, she couldn't expect to be much interested in any one of them, or even to know them apart. She only bears us; the nurses take care of us from the moment we are born until we are able to take care of ourselves. We don't kill our mother, anyway as long as she is vigorous and not too old, for it is very economical to have a few carefully selected, tested mothers produce all the children. But doesn't your father write about all of that in his book that tells people how to live like us?"
Baby was silent for a little while; then answered thoughtfully. "Why, yes; I had forgotten for the moment. He does have most of it in. But I think not that about killing off the fathers so soon. I'd hate to think of killing my father. He is such good fun sometimes; besides being no end of good to me all the time. He is especially good, I think, because I am not very strong, you know. I guess I shan't ever be able to walk. It's my back or something. Nobody tells me much, but I have heard them talk. And then always father comes and kisses me; and he cries a little."
The bee looked earnestly up into the baby's face. "It seems to me," it said after a moment, "that your father isn't very consistent. If you can never walk, he ought to kill you now, hadn't he? Excuse me, I didn't mean to say anything dreadful, but isn't that what the welfare of your race demands? Only strong well people to live; especially the women, the mothers of the race?"
The baby had recovered from her start at the bee's first words, and kept silent, evidently very thoughtful. Then a slow smile came over her face.
"I guess it's just because my father is a human being and not a bee or any other lower animal that he isn't consistent. Excuse me, but you know we have to call them that from our point of view. We are animals; science is right about that. And we do animal things. But there are so many different animal things. Not all animals are alike, are they? There are big differences between you and a starfish, aren't there; or just a stupid polyp that can only shut up and open like a plant, and eat, and bud off little polyps and jellyfishes. And probably there are big differences between a man and, well, even a bee or an ant. It's the scientific fashion just now to be awfully economical about explanations. What will explain a polyp is tried on the bees; and what explains the successful life of the bees and ants is made to do for human beings. I sometimes think my father's training is too much for his head. I know it contradicts his heart. Do you know, though, he isn't so inconsistent as he seems. For he says to mother that, weak as I am, I may sometime do more for the world than the strongest washerwoman that ever bore ten children. He says," and the baby dropped her voice to a soft whisper, "that I may write a beautiful poem or a great book that teaches faith and love, and do the world a lot of good by it. And mother says that whether I write it or not, I am a poem of beauty and a book that teaches love. So I suppose that is why father is so inconsistent about—about killing me, you know."
Just then a step sounded from the path around the corner.
"Oh, that is the nurse," cried the baby. "She will take me in. And she is so stupid; she won't let me have you in the house."
"Oh, well, anyway I have to be dying so soon now," said the bee, also a little sadly. "I am sorry that I can never see you again. It has all been so interesting. And you have taught me some things, and besides, and more than all, you have been good to me. I—I think you are going to be worth while to your race. I think you are already. You are worth while to all of us; to the whole world. You have given me ten minutes of happy living. Could you do just one little thing more for me? Will you drop me down under the lilac bush, so I can have our flowers, that we both like so well, over me when I am dead?" And one antenna rubbed slowly over one of the bee's eyes, as if this approach to humanness had engendered the impossible, a bee's tear.
The baby twisted her infirm little body about again, stretched out her hands, and gently lifted the bee. "Good-bye, dear Bee," she whispered; "Good-bye, dear Baby," answered the bee. Then the baby carried the bee to her lips, and kissed it.
At that very moment the nurse leaned over the carriage with an indulgent smile on her face, which changed swiftly to horrified dismay as she saw the bee at baby's lips. She cried aloud, while baby with a quick flirt of little hands lightly tossed the bee under the lilac. As the nurse saw the tears streaming down the baby's face she believed her worst fears realized, and catching the child to her bosom, she ran into the house saying over and over:
"Did a bad bee sting my itty bitty sweetie angel?" And as she ran she was amazed to hear among the baby's sobs what sounded like a spoken word repeated again and again. Baby really seemed to be saying, "No, No, No, No!"
The gigantic desk at which the Essayist was seated displayed row on row of pigeon-holes, and above them all was a big white card, on which appeared, in distinct black letters:
Saturday, January 31, 1914