Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/24

 Examine a few of them, and their true nature at once becomes apparent. The assertion that every person has a 'right' to a vote is, in any discussion with regard to woman suffrage, a mere assumption of the very point at issue. It belongs, further, to an obsolete school of thought. It is a remnant of that belief in 'innate rights' which was expelled from England by the passionate and irresistible reasoning of Burke, and by the cool and deadly analysis of Bentham. In France, indeed, at the time of the Revolution, the demand for natural rights was an excellent war-cry round which to rally men engaged in the assault upon obsolete, artificial, and noxious privileges. But the Republican statesmanship of modern France has forsaken the belief in natural rights, which in 1789 was the accepted faith no less of Constitutionalists than of Jacobins. The effect and the extent of this change of view may be measured by the contrast between the successful opportunism of Gambetta, which promised to the Third Republic a permanent existence, and the terrorism of Robespierre, which prepared the way for Napoleonic despotism.