for the enfranchisement of women has made greater strides than in the century before, and the seed sown long ago by Mary Wollstonecraft seems at last likely to bear fruit.
There must indeed have been a deep, though almost inarticulate, discontent among the women of England to render so rapid a change possible. This discontent has at last found voice, and that not only through the members of the Women's Social and Political Union. This book will, it is hoped, come as a revelation to many of the wide extent to which the desire for political enfranchisement has permeated all classes of women in this country. Among the older suffragists, among the women Trades Unionists of Lancashire and Cheshire, among the thrifty housewives of the Co-operative Guilds, the influence of the same militant spirit will be seen working as in the organisation whose tactics have occasioned so much comment. Nor is it only the organised women who have felt the influence of the new movement. No book could be adequately representative of this new enthusiasm unless it found a place for the professional woman. Miss Smedley, Miss McMillan, and Miss Atkinson here give us the views of feminine culture and literature, while Mr. Zangwill and Mr. Keir Hardie voice for us the reflex effect of the movement on masculine letters and masculine politics. In the world outside we may see things no less significant. In Parliament the question is no longer discussed flippantly, but with the gravity due to a matter of practical politics. In the congresses of Labour there may be divergence of method,
