Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/91

 tempted to use their votes as the means of wringing higher wages from the State.

It is, lastly, with confidence asserted that woman suffrage will make for the suppression of private vice at home and the maintenance of public peace abroad. This idea has for many noble and public-spirited women an immense fascination, but it is grounded in the main on error. Enthusiasm for a legislative crusade against immorality rests on that eternal confusion between the sphere of law and the sphere of ethics, which, as all experience shows, is invariably productive of immense evil. For the belief that women will always be in favour of peace there exists no solid foundation whatever. Capacity for passionate emotion is unfavourable to the calmness of judgment which anticipates the risks and forbids the cruelty and the wastefulness of war.

The reasons, on the other hand, against trying a hazardous constitutional experiment on an ancient commonwealth are of immense weight.

Woman suffrage means adult suffrage; and adult suffrage means the transfer of the right