Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/20

 no real parallel, may be carried through in obedience, not to the clearly expressed will of the nation, but to those calculations of election agents and wirepullers which guide the action even of honest statesmen who have too fully imbibed the spirit of Parliamentary partisanship.

My purpose in this correspondence is to make woman suffrage the subject of calm argument. I propose to examine the main reasons in favour of, and the objections which lie against, the establishment of woman suffrage, and then to insist upon the conclusion which such an investigation forces upon me, that a revolution of such boundless significance cannot be attempted without the greatest peril to England. My whole line of reasoning, let me point out, involves two assumptions. The one is that the concession of Parliamentary votes to women must be in the United Kingdom, either for good or bad, a revolution. The second is that woman suffrage must with us finally lead to its logical result—^that is, the complete political equality of men and women. Neither assumption can be disputed by any clear-headed suffragist.