she will be neither his equal nor his colleague. The lady who wants to take her share in public life and remain at the same time a respected lady must use all her mental gifts; she may be a respected political personality, but she will never be a peer of the men of politics.
"As for responsibility, and the high posts that demand great responsibilities in public life — every important career needs the sharpening of the mind, and needs training. Someone may ask: how is this training to be obtained? Many men, and a few women, enter the arena of public life in middle age or a little before, after they have achieved success in other fields — or, in the case of ladies, after the lady has become the mother of a family. But for the wife or the mother to be able to carry the burdens of a post of high standing, she must have persevered in practicing and training for it while she was carrying out her own household duties. In truth, success in political life depends to a great extent on the range and breadth of the experiences the politician has known in his past life. I have observed how a political figure, when a crisis breaks out and there is no time to consult advisers or refer to documents, is compelled to rely on past experience. I have said that political life needs specialization and training of a kind the lady at home has no hope of obtaining.
"Yet plentiful reading of biographies and of the history of modern governments can easily be done by way of the libraries. This is very necessary, so that a woman may equip herself with the experiences of others, contemporaries and predecessors. And if, madam, you live in one of the great cities, the matter is much easier for you, for you can also learn from what you hear and see around you, if you open your heart and forget your shyness. Then you will find that there is no one who knows more than you about the problems and difficulties and the ways of treating them. Have you ever tried to learn the solutions to problems that others have proposed? You have only to meet with those whose ways of thinking and of solving problems you approve, and you will soon find yourself in one of the political parties. Try to convince others that these solutions are right, and you will soon find that you have become a political advocate. Volunteer to attend the sessions of the municipal councils and defend your theories and opinions there, and you will find that you have become a political personality. These are the first steps — and how easy they are! What comes afterward depends on you, and in the first degree on the measure of your honesty with yourself, and on whether you are capable of listening to evidence and proofs in order to arrive at the truths."
Modern Trends among Story Writers
There are several ways of dividing the story into different kinds, but I believe the simplest and truest division is the one that divides them all into two kinds. In the first kind we find the stories that take people out of their own natures — that is, those which carry us away from reality: imaginative stories of love, adventure, and peril, whose heroes live in an atmosphere entirely different from the atmosphere the reader is accustomed to. The second kind consists of the stories that portray things and persons as they are in truth, or as the author imagines them in their real world. This is what we call "realism" in the art of the story.
Often we find that the stories we describe as "realistic" labor under the presence of certain characters — characters no closer to the world of truth than those we find in the imaginative, sentimental stories. Yet these stories, in spite of that, are surrounded by an air of reality that supports and strengthens them. This is usually something whose use or meaning everyone knows: it may be a factory, or a coal mine, or the huts of a shanty town, or the office of the head of a great financial concern. It is that realistic atmosphere beneath the story, in most cases, that makes the stories of this latter
class meet with currency and success. Since the First World War, Britain has abounded in books of a popular cast portraying real sides of life about which the general public knew little. I mention this now because of a story that lately won the story prize, written by a new author named Tom Hanlin, and entitled "Once in Every Lifetime." It is one of the simplest and shortest of stories, for it is a truthful portrayal — indeed an artless record — of the lives of two children who lived in two neighboring houses in one of the small mining villages of Scotland. They grew up together with the thought stirring in them of marrying one another, and the story ends with each of them marrying someone else.
The story is short, and its manner of telling works strongly upon the reader; but that is not the whole reason for the success it has gained, for there is in it no touch of loftiness or grandeur, nor has the author tried to show his two protagonists, Jenny Dewar and Frank Stewart, as victims of the cruelty of circumstances or of outside forces. For all that certain external circumstances befell them and left their mark, it was a certain flaw and deficiency in each of the two protagonists