The prefatory point here made is, in a word, that the following
doctrines are perhaps less reactionary than the ardent suffragette might
suppose, compatible as they are with an earnest belief in the fitness
and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of
Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a
ridiculous argument against woman suffrage--that it is the precursor of
a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women
being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with
girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than
women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both
sexes might well vote for the elderly women whose existence is somehow
forgotten in this connection.
No chapter will be found devoted to the question of the vote. The
omission is not due to reasons of space, nor to my ever having heard a
good argument against the vote--even the argument that women do not want
it. That women did not want the vote would only show--if it were the
case--how much they needed it. Nor is the omission due to any
lukewarmness in a cause for which I am constantly speaking and writing.
My faith in the justice and political expediency of woman suffrage has
survived the worst follies, in speech and deed, of its injudicious
advocates: I would as soon allow the vagaries of Mrs.
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