Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/11

 LETTER I

INTRODUCTION

You ask how it has happened that, though I was for many years an advocate, I have now become a convinced opponent of the introduction of woman suffrage into England? The question is a natural one. It is the better worth an answer because my own change of opinion has been shared by many of my contemporaries who began to take an interest in politics some fifty or sixty years ago. We all of us were Liberals; we most of us came under the influence of J. S. Mill, and we could not then have found a wiser, a nobler, and, above all, a more public-spirited teacher of the rights and duties of citizens. Under his guidance we favoured every attempt to extend not only the liberty 1