Page:Life of Octavia Hill as told in her letters.djvu/285

 attribute Octavia's zeal to an interest in the cause of Female Suffrage.

This mistaken idea seems to make this a proper place for a short word of explanation of her attitude on this question. The fact is that Octavia never felt the keen interest in the public questions of the day which animated Miranda; and, since she had discovered that she could do a definite piece of work for the good of the poor, she had begun to feel a positive dislike for Parliamentary life, and party politics, as tending to draw people away from "cultivating their own garden," into taking part in wider, but less immediately useful, work. This opinion she felt it specially necessary to emphasise in reference to women.

First; it was with women that she specially co-operated in her work among the poor; and her discovery of a new outlet for their energies, and her warm appreciation of their possible capacity, led her to look on the Female Suffrage movement as a sort of red herring drawn across the path of her fellow workers, which hindered them from taking an adequate interest in those subjects with which she considered them specially fitted to deal. Secondly, even in that pacific phase of the Female Suffrage movement, there were champions of this cause who thought it more important to call attention to what women could accomplish than to undertake regular work. Thus they seemed to promote that intense love of advertising which Octavia abhorred. Lastly, there were always people who assumed that one, who had done so much efficient work, must be in favour of a change, which would enable so many other women less well provided with powers of work to accomplish more than they could now succeed in doing. And this mistake was strengthened by the constant confusion between Octavia and her friend Miss Davenport Hill.

Although she acknowledged in a letter (written from Tortworth and published in this book) that this indifference to these larger issues deprived her of some valuable information, and put her at a disadvantage, she always continued, to the end of her life, to act in these matters rather (as in the Marylebone election) from motives of personal sympathy with some special adviser