women voting, and would tend to destroy the secrecy of the ballot.
The Council insisted on its amendment, and a conference was arranged, Mr Seddon being among the managers from the House. The point was debated at length in the conference. The Council’s managers retired and came back to the managers of the House with an ultimatum that they would agree that the women’s electoral right method of voting should not apply to the four city electorates, but it must apply in the country districts.
Mr. Seddon and his fellow managers considered that that was only an aggravation of the position taken up by the Council, as it was making a distinction between women in the country and in the towns. It was seen that the Council’s representatives had made up their minds and that nothing would shake them. When it was urged that women in the country would not record their votes owing to the distance they would have to travel, Mr. Seddon said that that difficulty could be overcome by providing that no polling-booths in the country electorates should be more than three miles apart. He made a distinct offer to the Council’s managers to arrange that that idea should be carried out if the amendment was withdrawn. Mr. Seddon’s proposal had been unanimously agreed to by the managers of the House, and would have removed the difficulty. Some of the Council’s managers professed to believe that the proposal could not be carried out in practice, but Mr. Seddon pointed out that tents, schoolhouses, farmhouses, and even shearers’ and shepherds’ huts could be used. It seemed to him absurd to think that in a colony where settlement had progressed at an extraordinary rate, it would be impossible to provide polling-booths at distances of three miles; but his offer was refused, the Council stood by its amendment, the House refused to agree to the proposal, the Bill was withdrawn, therefore, and the reform was lost for that year.
Mr. Seddon has been blamed by some of the supporters of the movement for not giving way, allowing the amendment to become law, and repealing it in a future session. The position he took up is quite clear, however. It is a position he had taken
