fiction has been circulated. Women can combine for great causes. They are capable of ardent loyalty one for the other. Why, then, it may be asked, have they not combined in the past?
Chiefly because it was impressed upon them from their childhood that they were dependent upon men. The girl who would live a comfortable life was tacitly taught that she would have to compete with other girls for the favour of men. She had to be prettier, smarter, better dressed, more attractive than others to win a prize in the matrimonial lottery.
The atmosphere of competition is inconsistent with loyalty; it makes combination impossible. Men know this perfectly well; they know also that the maintenance of their superiority depends on the rivalry and consequent subjection of women; and yet they have constantly twitted those whom they call the weaker sex on their inability to work in loyalty with their sisters. I believe that this has been done for the last time. To me one of the most profoundly important features of the present revolutionary movement amongst women is that they are proving their power to work together. There is being developed amongst them that which is, to me, the noblest of all our social virtues—the dear love and deathless loyalty of comrades. As I look round and forward I see this spirit growing. Very soon, without doubt, we shall obtain that for which we are asking—the right to vote in Parliamentary elections: the first instalment of the old debt of man to woman; and, for my own part, I shall never regret the conflict through which we are
