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occupied by women for the past sixteen years, and that of State Librarian since its creation. Three-fourths of the county superintendents are women, and one-third of the treasurers. The clerkships and second deputyships held by women in State offices and the number of women employed in State institutions bring more than half of the State pay-roll to

The presence of women in caucuses and political gatherings is kindly met by the men. This condition is also true in the neighboring State of Utah, as is illustrated by the following incident: A prominent Utah woman was being told the story of an Idaho woman's attendance as a delegate at the Republican State Convention, and was told that when the Idaho woman had mentioned this fact to a Far Eastern woman the Eastern woman had exclaimed, enthusiastically, "Oh, and did the women send you?" The Utah resident interrupted the story at this point. No, the men sent her," she said. A man had placed the Idaho woman's name in nomination and another had resigned his place in her favor.

NON-PARTISANSHIP

Party lines are not held as closely by the women as by the men, which may account for the adoption of a State primary law and the commission form of government in Boisé, both of which eliminate the old-time party conventions with their trading and machine rule. The women compose part of the membership of the Hughes-Fairbanks Clubs now under State organization, and two years ago there was a woman's Democratic Club; but the organizations where the women work shoulder to shoulder for civic reforms, as the Good Citizen Club, the Council of Women Voters, and civic departments of literary clubs, are invariably non-partisan. The measures thus launched are generally indorsed by all political parties or their candidates. The recent prohibition law, springing from the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the AntiSaloon League, was placed in the platform of both political parties and passed the Legislature with but one dissenting vote. The policy of making a measure an issue in one party and asking the women to vote outside their party to support it has never been followed.

Non-partisanship in lawmaking by both men and women is shown in the activity of the Legislative League, which was in session during the last session of the Legislature.

MEN MORE FAMILIAR WITH CIVIL
GOVERNMENT

Although the Western-trained woman takes her balloting naturally, the race training which for generations has endowed men with this responsibility is noticeable in the greater familiarity of the men with statutory technicalities. As yet the conversation and companionships of the average girl do not give her as accurate a civic training as her brother's, although she is intelligently informed. Mrs. Cynthia Mann, a teacher at the time of the adoption of suffrage, and later donor of the Idaho State Children's Home site, said in a memorandum the year following suffrage:

"Another effect that is worthy of notice is the great interest among the pupils of our public schools in the study of political economy. The girls often felt less interest in this science because they would have no voice in political affairs, while most boys said that they could vote without studying this science. Now the girls, like their mothers, look upon this new responsibility as a grave one. boys are not to be outdone, and it is delightful to see the zeal with which they attack this so-called dull study."

The

The greater part of the book work in connection with elections in Idaho, including registration and polling, is done by the women, which gives them a more intimate conception of the machinery of government. The polls are quiet and maintain somewhat the dignity of a formal social function with men and women present.

The omens are already in the sky predicting that women may become more informed as citizens than the men. The women's clubs for civic study and the practical application which is given their balloting are having a broadening and educational effect. Where is to be found an organization of men with the purpose of perfecting the members for the more efficient performance of the duties of citizenship? The history of education, which at first in the annals of mankind was restricted to the masculine sex, may be considered as a precedent, the number of women completing high school and collegiate courses now exceeding that of the men.

IS THE FEMININITY OF WOMEN AFFECTED? Has the ballot affected the femininity of women? If the charm of womanhood has escaped with the entrance of the ballot, both men and women are so blind to the condition as not to know their loss. Rare indeed would be the person found repining for the good old days when women couldn't vote. Do the women vote the same as their husbands? Some women vote to the dictation of the men, which condition will continue until every woman knows how to express her own self. The point is, the woman who is awake to her privilege of expression has it, and it is potentially possible to the unknowing one when she awakens. Some men still sleep. There has not been a record of the percentage of men and women voting, but in some precincts it is said that more women than men vote.

THE OLD AND NEW IDEALS OF CITIZENSHIP

Twenty years of the ballot in the hands of women with men in Idaho has developed that State along moral and advanced lines, with legislation which has outrun the old Puritanical States of their forefathers. The temptations of the early days-drink, gambling, and houses of ill repute are swept away. But it is claimed by some who have watched the change of the past twenty-five years that Idaho with statutes, granting them enforced, is not as righteous as Idaho without statutes. The story of the pack-driver

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all aggressive opposition ceased. Those who had been zealous opponents refrained from predicting the evil consequences that would be the result of women voting, and at all elections held since, primary, municipal, and school, have vied with the ardent advocates of this reform in politics in securing the presence at the polls of this new element in governmental affairs.”

It has continued sane in its operation; the leaders among the women are of a high type. Its inherent policy of educating the general public to its reforms burns out fanaticism in the long journey of the proposed enactments through committees, local discussions, and press reports. The exaggeration of energy displayed in the fray for suffrage is one of the results of antagonism. When the antagonism is withdrawn and suffrage is permitted to fill its mission, its course has been found to be orderly and constructive This is the inevitable working of the metaphysical law. For equal suffrage is an expression of the principle of equality, and, as a principle in operation, can produce only harmony and satisfaction in its proper manifestation.

improved freshness of quality which the direct-marketing plan affords.

The typical buying club in the East purchases its eggs from producing sections as far West as Iowa, and brings them on in quantities of a hundred dozen. Its butter, packed in easily divisible units of one-pound cartons, comes from any of the large creameries of Indiana or Ohio. Poultry, beef, pork, and lamb in handy lots of fifty or a hundred pounds are obtained from the mail-order departments of large packing-houses of the West. And vegetables, honey, fruits, nuts, and dozens of other products of the farm and orchard are bought in quantity, transported in quantity, paid for in advance by the club, and then divided up among its members. The buying club depends for its success upon the elimination of all unnecessary middlemen; conducts what in reality is a long-distance mail-order marketing plan, with the whole. country for its shopping field.

it

Two things are responsible for the buying

club idea and its growth: the industrial work of the express companies in linking up country producer and city consumer in an effort to recoup traffic losses caused by the parcel post, and the extraordinary sudden eagerness of many large producers of meat, butter, and other foodstuffs to sell direct to the city co-operative club. The transportation companies have brought consumer and producer into actual commercial touch by the gathering and publishing of specific price quotations, details of quality and packing, and other essentials to successful direct marketing. Reputa-) ble farmers and large wholesalers anxious to break into the new market have been sought. out and educated to standardize their product and maintain that standard as carefully as the corner grocer does this for the city housewife. Weekly bulletins with definite offers by reliable producers have become an institution among thousands of consumers' clubs. The express, with its country agents on the one hand and its city agents on the other, has been able to bring buyer and seller into mutual confidence. Coupled with the sales initiative of producers to go direct to the kitchen of the consumer-an initiative which has meant the invention of new carriers and containers especially adapted to shipping direct to consumers' clubs-this industrial work has resulted in the organization of thousands of city co-operative clubs, the first real co-operative movement in the country.

The buying clubs range in size from twenty to three hundred members. In a fashionable suburb of New York one large club is operated among more than three hundred families. Its Thanksgiving turkey order runs over nine hundred pounds. In a single winter month its "market-basket" amounted to 60 dozen stalks of celery, 1,000 dozen eggs, 700 pounds of poultry, and 2,000 pounds of other products bought direct from farmers and packers and creameries. A large club in Chicago among the employees of a business firm spends nearly $5,000 a month among the producers of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. It reckons its savings at twenty-five per cent, and is big enough to retain the exclusive services of a salaried clerk to conduct the affairs of the club. The town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, with 70,000 population, is served by fortyodd buying clubs which embrace a membership of several hundred families. In a single day the local express agent received orders for lake fish to the extent of 2,000 pounds-or

ders which were transmitted to fish-producing companies and filled direct to consumers' clubs

-as well as for 3,000 dozen eggs and large consignments of honey, California dried fruits, and smoked hams and strips of bacon. And the Easter week (1915) order of a large Fifth Avenue, New York, buying club ran as follows:

Retail Price Prevalent.

25c. lb. 24c. "

Consideration of the detailed methods of a typical metropolitan buying club in cutting the living costs of its members will make the significance of the movement apparent. In one lower New York Broadway business firm over two hundred employees are organized to buy foodstuffs direct. The secretary of the club gathers orders from the individual members early in the week, lumps them, selects the names of producers with whom he would prefer to deal from the weekly quotation lists supplied to the buying clubs by the food products departments of the express companies, and sends in an order. He can ask the transportation company to handle this order for him if he desires, leaving it at a branch office, or can himself mail the order with check. Frequently, after getting in touch with good producers, the buying clubs deal directly with them. The secretary knows that any producers quoted on the weekly bulletin are reliable-that they are better prepared than the average farmer for shipping highquality goods direct to consumers. The bulk of his " grocery list" is weekly made up of butter, eggs, and meats, although, in season, vegetables and fruits are popular.

Upon stated days the various products arrive for distribution-butter and eggs one day, meats the next, etc. Right here the buying club stands or falls. How much labor is involved in the distribution to members? Is it too much bother? For if it is, no co-operative scheme will succeed in America. The manufacturers-the country producers have calculated upon this; they have seen that the way to make a consumers' co-operative scheme successful is to make the work at the consumers' end as easy as possible-something which has never been carefully worked out before. So the lower Broadway club secretary finds the butter, for instance, packed in sanitary, waxed-cardboard cartons of one pound each; the eggs already

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and vegetables brought into a town through the newly dredged channel of the buying club forces upon the retailer the necessity for a simplification of the distribution system where it is possible to simplify. In some cases it has resulted in the retailers themselves turning to the very supply fields drawn upon by the buying club, and thus getting their stocks direct from producers where before they had been buying from jobbers and other wholesalers. Buying club competition in the town of Nyack, New York, forced the prices of staples down nearly twenty-five per cent for an entire winter, and resulted in the carrying of fresher and more varied stocks in several retail stores.

The consumers' end of the buying club movement is profitable, both directly when club members save money and indirectly when a family profits by a regulated price level. But to the farmer and country manufacturer of food products it has been even more profitable to many a man it has meant a brand-new sort of market with twenty to one hundred per cent better prices for his goods than he ever got before. The creation of thousands of buying club markets anxious to buy direct from country sources has developed a small class of business farmer whose function is really that of a mail-order house. And, as has been suggested, in addition to the clubs themselves, often city retailers have come direct to the country to do their buying. An egg gatherer in a small New York town, by.catering specially to the buying club trade of New York and Buffalo, developed a business of $5,000 a month within six months. Through quotations on the express weekly bulletins he secured the patronage of club after club, until, as is frequently the case in industrial work, he was forced to request the transportation company to withdraw his name from the bulletin, because of too many orders received.

There are innumerable instances of the creation of wider and more profitable markets for farmers through the buying club movement. By standardizing their produce at the source-that is, by carefully grading and neatly packing their foodstuffs for shipmentlettuce-growers, apple-growers, and honeyproducers have found new channels for the disposition of their goods at much better prices than they received when marketing in the old way. Sixty thousand pounds of honey were marketed via express in small consignments during a single season for one