Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/80

 terminated at all costs by a treaty which, in the eyes of most Englishmen, sacrificed the dignity and imperilled the independence of the country?

Add to this a consideration to which little attention has been paid. The army, the police, governors of gaols, every person, in short, by whom the coercive power of the State is directly exercised, must, under any constitution whatever, be men. Whenever, therefore, a large majority of male electors is outvoted by a majority constituted mainly of women, the minority will command the sympathy of the officials by whose hands the State exercises its power. Woman suffrage, therefore, in common with every system which separates nominal sovereignty from the possession of irresistible power, involves the risk that the constitutional sovereign of the country may be rendered powerless by a class, in this instance the majority of the male electors, possessed of predominant physical force.

Look at the connection between force and government from another point of view. It is an open secret of sound constitutionalism