Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/15

 neither assert nor hold that political Unionism is logically inconsistent with the belief that English women ought to receive Parliamentary votes. I merely insist upon the simple fact that the grounds on which most Unionists rest their moral right to maintain the Union against the wishes of the majority of the people of Ireland are opposed to some of the reasons and much of the sentiment which tell in favour of the movement for woman suffrage.

Secondly, thought and also experience convince^ me that the current maxims of Liberalism (as also of Conservatism), though they may contain a large element of important truth, are never absolutely true principles, from which a wise man can safely draw far-reaching logical deductions. As I hope to show you in a future letter, they may be useful watchwords, but they are nothing more. Hence, as years went by, I came to see that democratic maxims, even when endorsed by Mill, possessed nothing like the authority which, in common with most of my contemporaries at Oxford, I used to ascribe to them. I could no longer accept with something like implicit faith every dogma