Page:Female suffrage (Smith).djvu/13

 as directly as ever it was to the House of Commons. There may be some repugnance, natural or traditional, to be overcome in admitting women to seats in Parliament, but there is also some repugnance to be overcome in throwing them into the turmoil of contested elections, in which, as soon as Female Suffrage is carried, some ladies will unquestionably claim their part. Supposing Parliament to declare sex no longer a political disqualification, it is difficult to see on what ground Peeresses in their own right could be prevented from taking their seats in the House of Lords.

There are members of Parliament who shrink from the step which they are now urged to take, but who fancy that they have no choice left them because the municipal franchise has already been conceded. The municipal franchise was no doubt intended to be the thin end of the wedge. Nevertheless there is a great step between this and the national franchise; between allowing female influence to prevail in the disposition of school rates, or other local rates, and allowing it to prevail in the supreme government of the country. To see that it is so, we have only to imagine the foreign policy of England determined by the women, while that of other countries is determined by the men; and this in the age of Bismarck. In case the great European conflict, for which everybody is armed, should come, it seems not difficult to predict the fate of a nation whose councils should be swayed by its women.

The writer of this paper himself once signed a petition for Female Household Suffrage got up by Mr. Mill. He has always been for enlarging the number of active citizens as much as possible, and widening the basis of government, in accordance with the maxim, which seems to him the sum of political philosophy, "That is the best form of government which doth most actuate and dispose all parts and members of the commonwealth to the common good." He had not, when he signed the petition, seen the public life of women in the United States. But he was at once led to reconsider what he had done, and prevented from going further, by finding that the movement was received with mistrust by