Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/30

 believed that the maxim on which they relied was absolutely true. Americans originally conceded that their favourite formula did not apply to duties on imports. Not a single English Whig, from Chatham downwards, meant to assert that every man in England who paid a tax ought to have a vote. They knew well enough that reckless extension of the suffrage, which might in the days of the Stewarts have been the destruction of Parliamentary government, might quite conceivably, during the reign of George III., give unlimited extension to that royal influence which every Whig professedly abhorred. It is allowable here to press a plain question upon suffragists. Would any Italian patriot, even though he were a Republican irreconcilable to the Monarchy, admit to the Parliamentary franchise the women of Italy at the risk of handing over the government of the country to priests and reactionists? Everyone can supply the true answer to this question. The reply, of course, decides nothing as to the advisability of introducing woman suffrage into England, but it does dispose of the authority attributed by many zealous