Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/444

428 political power in unfit hands. An analogous stroke of strategy, it seems, is now meditated by the same tacticians in the case of female suffrage, the motion in favor of which is brought forward by one of their supporters, and has already received the adhesion of their chief. The very foundations of society are touched when party tampers with the relations of the sexes.

In England the proposal at present is to give the suffrage only to unmarried women being householders. But the drawing of this hard-and-fast line is at the outset contested by the champions of women's rights; and it seems impossible that the distinction should be maintained. The lodger-franchise is evidently the vanishing-point of the feudal connection between political privilege and the possession of houses or land. The suffrage will become personal in England, as it has elsewhere. If a property qualification remains, it will be one embracing all kinds of property: money settled on a married woman for her separate use, as well as the house or lodgings occupied by a widow or a spinster. In the counties already, married women have qualifications in the form of land settled to their separate use; and the notion that a spinster in lodgings is specially entitled to the suffrage, as the head of a household, is one of those pieces of metaphysics in which the politicians who affect to scorn any thing metaphysical are apt themselves unwarily to indulge. If the present motion is carried, the votes of the female householders, with that system of election pledges which is now enabling minorities, and even small minorities, to control national legislation, will form the crow-bar by which the next barrier will be speedily forced.

Marriage itself, as it raises the position of a woman in the eyes of all but the very radical section of the Woman's Right party, could hardly be treated as politically penal. And yet an act conferring the suffrage on married women would probably be the most momentous step that could be taken by any legislature, since it would declare the family not to be a political unit, and for the first time authorize a wife, and make it in certain cases her duty as a citizen, to act publicly in opposition to her husband. Those at least who hold the family to be worth as much as the state will think twice before they concur in such a change.

With the right of electing must ultimately go the right of being elected. The contempt with which the candidature of Mrs. Victoria Woodhull for the presidency was received by some of the advocates of female suffrage in America only showed that they had not considered the consequences of their own principles. Surely she who gives the mandate is competent herself to carry it. Under the parliamentary system, whatever the forms and phrases may be, the constituencies are the supreme arbiters of the national policy, and decide not only who shall be the legislators, but what shall be the course of legislation. They have long virtually appointed the ministers, and now they