282 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
The class and local interests need to be watched closely, because they 
are encouraged by those around us who are of the same class and who live 
.n the same locality, and they are extolled by them as showing genuine 
public spirit. Selfishness pure and simple does not meet with this 
ancouragement, because other people’s private interests are different from 
our own. 
There are many points of detail in which a primer on the duties of a 
citizen written for American children would be different from what would 
suit Australia, but the broad principles might be the same. We have 
no such great issue as the election of the head of the state for four years, 
aor have we the bewildering number of officials to elect. But the responsi- 
oilities of citizens in America appear to me to be the greater because the 
country is so great, and because it stands out as the greatest permanent 
democratic government in the world. And the manner in which the best 
men keep out of politics seems to me to point toward the necessity of 
training all the young for citizenship, of inculeating from the earliest years 
the duty that every one owes to the land he lives in. And, whether girls 
are going to have the suffrage granted to them or not, they should not be 
excluded from such lessons. The word citizen should be understood in 
its widest sense, as one subject to the Jaws of the land and having an inter- 
est in all things which concern other fellow-citizens. It does not mean an 
inhabitant of a city; it does not mean a voter at elections ; it means a 
member of a community. 
Although the girls in our public schools may never have to vote at elec- 
tions or to serve on juries, and cannot aspire to be representatives or con- 
gressmen or presidents of the United States, they have too much interest 
in good government and too much influence in the world to be left safely 
in ignorance of the great natural laws of Providence or of the law of the 
land. It has been by the advance of civilization and by the operation of 
just laws that women have been raised from being the drudges or the toys 
of men to be their companions, and in many respects their equals. The 
progress of the world in health and in wealth, in knowledge and in good- 
ness, depends on the character and conduct of its women as much as on 
those of its men, and there can be no greater mistake for girls to make 
than to suppose they have nothing to do with good citizenship and good 
government. 
The fact that so much of the work in your elementary schools is in 
the hands of women, and that these are not supposed to take any active 
part in political matters, ought not to tell against my argument. Many 
of our political methods are inherited from old militant ideals. The 
desire that our party should triumph, right or wrong, is a legacy from 
the desire that our country should triumph whether the. cause of war was 
just or unjust. 
Women ought to build up from the social and not from the militant