Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/67

 adult suffrage. Every citizen of the United Kingdom, for example, pays taxes; how can any man or woman who relies on the dogma that taxation involves representation deny that every citizen of the United Kingdom is entitled to a vote? No one, again, who notes the development of popular government throughout the world can doubt the probability that manhood suffrage, which already exists in France, in Germany, in Switzerland, in the United States, and in most of our self-governing colonies, will at no distant date be established in the United Kingdom. But even the most moderate and sagacious of the agitators for woman suffrage admit, or rather demand, that manhood suffrage shall involve adult suffrage. It would, lastly, be no easy task to give, even in name, political equality to women under our present electoral system. The mere extension of the present system so as to include women would have some extraordinary results. It would in many cases exclude from what suffragists call 'the elementary rights of citizenship' a large number of married women; that is exactly the class of women who, in the judgment of most