Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/51

 true, a cogent argument against woman suffrage.

.—The acquisition of votes by women will, it is constantly asserted, work the moral and social regeneration of England. This belief on the part of suffragists is natural. There are virtues, such as modesty, ready sympathy with, and compassion for poverty and suffering, which, though possessed in some degree by most human beings, are deemed, whether rightly or not, to be specially feminine. There are other virtues, such as warlike courage, love of justice, or a passion for truth, which, though happily not the monopoly of either sex, are, whether rightly or not, deemed to be specially masculine. What can be more apparently reasonable than the expectation that when women are given a new share in the government of the nation the private virtues belonging more peculiarly to women may become blended with the public virtues which specially distinguish men, and thus produce in the public life of England such a combination of justice and compassion, of mercy and of truthfulness, as the world has never before wit-