Page:"Homo Sum" being a letter to an anti-suffragist from an anthropologist.djvu/33

29 sister-women wanted a vote. Something caught me in the throat. I felt that they were feeling, and then, because I felt, I began to understand.

To feel keenly is often, if not always, an amazing intellectual revelation. You have been wandering in that disused rabbit-warren of other people's opinions and prejudices which you call your mind, and suddenly you are out in the light. If this letter should meet the eye of any Militant Suffragist (pugnacity, may I say, is not my favourite virtue, though my sympathies are always apt to go more with the church militant than the church triumphant), I should like, though I do not fight in her camp, to thank her from my heart for doing me a signal service, for making me feel, and thereby teaching me to understand.

An eminent novelist has recently told us that women are to have higher education, but not political power, not the Parliamentary vote. Women are "unfit to govern." An eminent statesman has only yesterday told us that women may have university training, they may even look for that priceless boon, that crown of intellectual effort, the degree of Bachelor of Arts; they may have knowledge, and the label that guarantees them as knowing, but membership of the university, power to govern, power to shape the teachings by which they have profited, No.

Have Mrs. Humphry Ward and Lord Curzon, in their busy and beneficent lives, found time to read M. Henri Bergson's "L'Evolution Créatrice"? Long ago Socrates told us that we only know in order that we may act. M. Bergson has shown us how this is, and why. Intellect as contrasted with instinct, is the tool-maker, is essenti-