to hear what the "suffragettes" had to say. The Union has secured for the women of England the ear of the electorate, and, whatever may happen in the future, Women's Suffrage is henceforth a living question.
All this is well, for the issue raised is the greatest of modern times. On its decision depends nothing less than the character of the whole progressive movement in England. Under our eyes, the young democracy is taking shape; it is stating its peculiar problems, and formulating its answers to them. Questions of education, temperance, unemployment, housing, land, poverty, and finance, little regarded by the last generation, form the subject matter of politics in the present, and will do so still more in the immediate future. Yet, in the phrase already employed, so long as women remain without direct influence in the life of the nation these things can only come to life in a vitiated atmosphere. The removal of the sex disqualification will bring fresh air into English politics. Every advance made by constructive democracy must touch, never less, often more intimately the lives of women than of men, and the work of the age is constructive democracy. But parliaments respond only to voting pressure, rarely indeed to argument pure and simple; and thus the exclusion of women from the franchise means their exclusion from the work of the age. A grant of the suffrage to women on the same terms as men would only enfranchise a limited number of women, but it would suffice to change for the better the mental outlook of almost every
