Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/96

 throughout life been zealous to extend the civil rights of English women, it may well seem decisive. They will refuse to sanction a policy which, if it offers some dubious benefits to women, threatens irreparable damage, and great and immediate peril to England.

Will the kind of argument, you ask, which I have laid before you in these letters, pressed as it has been, and is, in every shape and from all sides upon public attention, arrest a dangerous revolution?

No one knows. It will certainly not commend itself to enthusiasts who believe that they are resisting laws unjust to women, when in reality they are attacking, not human law, but the very nature of things. One circumstance fills me with hope. It is the calm but vigorous action of women who protest against a policy which they hold to be injurious to the nation as a whole, and especially to women themselves. They have already achieved much. They have aroused the attention of the country. They have made it absolutely impossible that a measure far more revolutionary than the introduction of manhood