Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/29

 are not represented in Parliament is no proof of their right to enfranchisement. To shout 'Votes for women!' does not prove that English women ought to have votes.

Let us next examine the specially English dogma that 'taxation involves representation.' During the War of Independence it was the war-cry of American patriots, and was re-echoed by English Whigs, and notably by Chatham. It was a really serviceable formula at a crisis when it was of vital importance to remind ordinary Englishmen that the moral right, as well as the power, of the British Parliament to legislate for the inhabitants of Massachusetts or New York was materially affected by the fact that neither Massachusetts nor New York sent a single representative to the Parliament at Westminster. But neither the leaders in the War of Independence nor the Whigs of England