Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/1038

Rh beautiful equipages, fine saddle-horses and riders and the skill with which the [sic]bycicles were so rapidly engineered through the crowded streets. The general use of bicycles and tricycles all over England, even for long journeys, is fast becoming the favorite mode of locomotion both for ladies and gentlemen.

It was a pleasant surprise to meet the large number of Americans usually at the receptions of Mrs. Peter Taylor. Graceful and beautiful in full dress, standing beside her husband, who evidently idolizes her, Mrs. Taylor appeared quite as refined in her drawing-room as if she had never been "exposed to the public gaze," while presiding over a suffrage convention. Mr. Peter Taylor, M. P., has been untiring in his endeavors to get a bill through parliament against "compulsory vaccination." Mrs. Taylor is called the mother of the suffrage movement. The engraving of her sweet face which adorns the English chapter will give the reader a good idea of her character. The reform has not been carried on in all respects to her taste, nor on what she considers the basis of high principle. Neither she nor Mrs. Jacob Bright has ever been satisfied with the bill asking the right of suffrage for "widows and spinsters" only. To have asked this right "for all women duly qualified," as but few married women are qualified by possessing property in their own right, the result would have been substantially the same without making any invidious distinctions. Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Bright felt that as married women were the greatest sufferers under the law, they should be the first rather than the last to be enfranchised. The others, led by Miss Becker, claimed that it was good policy to make the demand for "spinsters and widows," and thus exclude the "family unit "and "man's headship" from the discussion; and yet these were the very points on which the objections were invariably based. They claimed that if "spinsters and widows" were enfranchised they would be an added power to secure to married women their rights. But the history of the past gives no such assurance. It is not certain that women would be more just than men, and a small privileged class of aristocrats have long governed their fellow-countrymen. The fact that the spinsters in the movement advocated such a bill shows that they are not to be trusted in