The unanswerable arguments sown broadcast throughout the pages of "The Subjection of Women" have not yet blossomed into fruitage in Great Britain, but the harvest has been almost completely garnered in our self-governing Australian and New Zealand colonies. Enquiries made in these colonies elicited the interesting admission that early settlers were influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill when founding their new states, and with their wives, the pioneer comrades of their years of hardship, by their side, the cold arguments of the philosopher were illuminated by living witnesses to the fact that the civilisation of new communities depends upon the presence and co-operation of women.
The Anglo-Saxons of the Southern hemisphere are doing what Tacitus tells us the Saxons did of old, for "in all grave matters they consulted their women."
During the early decades of the nineteenth century, while the Benthamites were engaged in controversy, political events were making, as is the wont of our country, a slow and laboured march.
It was not until 1832 that the Reform Act was carried which extended the right to vote from the freeholders and freeman to the middle-class male householder. This enabling law for men was a disabling law for women. In the previous statutes carried during the reigns of Henry IV., William III., and George III. the electors might have been women. No bar stayed them—in law. But the one word "male," introduced into 19 and 20 of 2 W. IV. c. 45 (1832), threw a legal barrier across the electoral path
