Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/23

 in Parliament'; and it is difficult to maintain that, in one sense of the word 'class,' English women do not make up a very large class—the majority, indeed, of the nation—and a division of human beings assuredly distinct from the whole body of men. We need not illustrate the point further. The reasoner who relies on any of these current maxims of popular government may readily be driven to admit that the principles or formulas dear to all English Liberals sanction, in words at least, the demand of votes for women.

Yet reasoning based on such democratic principles, effective though it be, admits of an easy reply. These so-called 'principles' are not anything like absolute truths. They are at best maxims, watchwords, catchwords, or shibboleths, which at particular crises of human progress have done good service by summing up ideas sound enough for the practical purposes of the moment. They have never, even as maxims, been rules which any statesman of common sense, even though he may have been the stanchest [sic] of democrats, unreservedly applied to the government of mankind.