of women are concerned. We want to ask ourselves, and to set others to ask themselves, 'Ought these things to be supported simply because they exist?' 'Could we not come nearer to righteousness if we aimed at a higher ideal of justice?'
It will no doubt be argued by some, that while much yet remains to be done before the balance is adjusted, so as to give perfect justice to women, yet that much has already been done to improve their legal status, and that it is not too much to hope that in time all grievances will be redressed without giving women votes.[1] The Married Women's Property Act, it is said, has redressed a great and crying evil; why may not other evils be redressed in the same way? To such as use this argument it may be replied that, in the first place, the Married Women's Property Act would probably never have been introduced or heard of, if it had not been for the wider movement for the parliamentary representation of women. The women's suffrage societies, by constant and untiring efforts actively carried on for sixteen years, have done something to awaken that keener sense of justice to women to which reference has just been made. However, let it be supposed that this view of the history of the passing of the Married Women's Property Act is entirely erroneous, and let it be supposed that the Legislature have, of their own free will, quite unmoved by any representations made to them by women, been graciously pleased to say that married women may have what is their own. What right has any set of human beings to say to another, 'I concede to you that piece of justice, and I withhold this, not because you ask for either, or can make me give you either, but because I choose to act so'? What is the policy, what is the sense, of compelling half the English people to hold their liberty on such terms as these? All this circumlocution is unnecessary and inexpedient. Give women the rights of free citizenship, the power to protect themselves, and then they will let their representatives know what they want and why they want it. They will find, no doubt—as other classes have found—that though the price of liberty is vigilance, the House of Commons will never turn a deaf ear to well-considered measures of reform which are demanded by the constituencies.
This movement for the representation of women is nothing more nor less than a simple outgrowth of the democracy which has been the gradual product of this century. The old ideal of government, even in England, which has had representative institutions so long, was that the few should govern the many. The democratic ideal—which has been steadily growing here, on the Continent, and in America—is that the many should govern themselves. When the representatives of the present electorate undertake a further extension of the suffrage, we ask them to be true to their own principles, to be
- ↑ The Birmingham programme does not lend much probability to this hopeful view of women's prospects of getting the benefits of representation without votes.
