The time has come when in all such changes from private and volunteer work of a few to the demand for support and the dependence upon guidance of the many, through public officials, we should have some clear guiding principle.

What that principle may be it is not the purpose here to discuss, but the state that is now doing so much that only families were formerly expected to do, and is attempting to do so much that only trained and devoted service of experts chosen by acknowledged leaders in social service has previously tried to accomplish, must be tutored and must be supervised by a more intelligent electorate if it is to do its more ambitious tasks well.
No private agency should allow its finest fruits of longest study and effort to be absorbed by official provision and control, unless it can gain assurance that those fruits will be secure in the transfer.
This all indicates that women voters who have, happily, no past bondage to partisanship to overcome, who entered upon their political power with no pledges to any one party to hamper their free action, and who, being indebted to progressive party leaders in every one of the political divisions, have friends in every one, may and should do much to help progressive and independent men voters to solve the deeper problems of our political situation with clarity of judgment and true patriotic devotion.[21] =Difficulty in Being a Good American Citizen.=--We have the most mixed of populations.

We have the greatest variety of inherited national and racial backgrounds in the electorate.

We have the widest stretches of country, and therefore the most difficult adjustments to any centralized system of government.

We have the most mobile common life, our people moving from State to State, and from one sectional interest to another with bewildering frequency.