friendless, that women first learnt to realise the special need of the franchise for themselves.
This is true not only of American and English women but of women in all countries. We have had recent examples in the women of Russia and Finland who have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the work for political freedom, sharing with men in all the dangers and suffering equally with them in the attempt to obtain liberty for their country. The Women's Suffrage Movement was not, as has been asserted, the outcome of an agitation by a few women of ill-balanced minds, inspired by an unreasonable hatred of men. The root and mainspring of the demand was the desire to release the slave, to succour the wounded, to bring light to the prisoners, and to combat immorality.
It was, perhaps, fitting that the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 should have been the starting-point of the work for women's enfranchisement. At all events it was the action of the men, who by an overwhelming vote refused to the women delegates from the Anti-Slavery Societies in America the right to sit and deliberate in that assembly, that gave the impetus to the Women's Suffrage agitation in America. This refusal to allow their fellow-workers recognition must have aroused in the minds of English women working at that time for social reforms serious reflections on the position women occupied in regard to the State. Among these were Mary Carpenter, who may indeed be taken as a type of the woman who, in beginning her work for the benefit of others, had no thought of the need of the franchise for her
