Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/50

 politics and economics, that Parliamentary votes will raise their wages. The relation, indeed, between votes and earnings has for the last few months been actively discussed in the newspapers. I observe, however, that as the controversy progresses suffragists grow less and less confident about the closeness of the connection between the possession of a vote and the rise in the rate of a woman's earnings. There is another sense in which a vote or political power may, I admit, have its pecuniary value. It may be used by women, and still more by a body of women, to wring money, or money's worth, from the State. A Ministry in want of support may bid high for the votes of women. But such traffic in votes is nothing better than sheer bribery, and, in the eyes of honest men and of honest women, bribery is none the more respectable because it is the corruption, not of an individual, but of a class, or because the bribe comes neither out of the pocket of a member of Parliament, nor out of the funds of a party, but out of the public revenue. The possibility that newly enfranchised women may be specially open to such corruption affords, if