blundering in what they do do, but blundering still more badly in what they do not do, in the terribly important provinces of life which they leave untouched by legislation. We men require this Reform as much for our own sakes as for women's sakes.
Ladies and gentlemen, strong as the Women's Suffrage Party is in brilliant women of our London world, its life-sap comes, I venture to think, from where so much of the energy, the wisdom and the earnestness of England reside—from the Provinces. Were it only a metropolitan exotic, a society luxury, it would soon pine away. But its roots go deep into our national soil, and draw their sustenance and vitality from all those myriads of obscure underground working women. These working women are not womanly, they are not domestic. True, they still weave and spin for man, but no longer by their own hearths. They must leave their homes and their babes to become machines in a world of machinery. And we men, we hypocrites, who prate so much of womanliness and domesticity, what care have we had for these? No vote can make them so unwomanly as not having a vote has made them. Perhaps, on the contrary, the vote may be the only means of bringing them back to womanliness. For only since the working men in these dismal towns have had a vote has their lot become at all human. What Christianity cannot do, what charity cannot do, what all the thunder of your Carlyles and your Ruskins cannot do, a simple vote does. And so to these myriads of tired women who rise in the raw dawn and troop to their cheerless factories, and who, when the twilight falls, return not to rest but to the labours of a squalid household, to these the thought of Women's Suffrage, which comes as a sneer to the man about town, comes as a hope and a prayer. Who dares leave that hope unillumined, that prayer unanswered? Surely not the most powerful Liberal Government of our generation,
