Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/89

 from, or guard them against, grievous wrongs. But we now know from happy experience that such wrongs may be, as they in fact have been, removed or averted by a Parliament consisting solely of men, and in the election whereof no woman had a part.

To give votes to women is, we are assured, nothing but the final step in that path of democratic progress which, during the last eighty years, has led the men and women of England towards freedom and happiness. Grant—though the concession is an extravagant one—that the benefits derived from the development of popular government are not only, as they certainly are, great, but have also been unmixed with any evil, it is easy enough to show that they have been obtained, in Great Britain at least, by adherence to the fundamental canon of individualism, 'that over himself, his own body and mind, the individual is, or ought to be, sovereign'—that is, by the extension of the civil rights of individuals, whether men or women. But the dogma that an individual, whether man or woman, has a right to determine matters which mainly concern such individual, goes