Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/18

 for the punishment of both the giving and the receiving of bribes at a Parliamentary election. It justifies the deprivation of whole classes—such, for example, as the Irish forty-shilling freeholders—of their votes, and this, too, without giving them any pecuniary or other compensation. My conviction as to the true nature of a Parliamentary vote led inevitably to the conclusion that the expediency, or what in such a matter is the same thing, the justice, of giving Parliamentary votes to English women depends on the answer to the inquiry, not whether a large number of English women, or English women generally, wish for votes, but whether the establishment of woman suffrage will be a benefit to England?

To this question I am unable to return an affirmative answer. I have become, therefore, of necessity an opponent of woman suffrage.