Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/13

13 on the preliminary condition that they shall be restricted to "every male person of full age, and not subject to any legal incapacity." This condition precedent is repeated in reference to every qualification then for the first time known to the constitution. Never before, and never after, is such a term as "male person" employed in any statute of the realm. It is an entire novelty, and in reference to such an unspeakably important as consideration the right of the people to choose their representatives, I am entitled to say it is a flagrant innovation. Nay, I am warranted in going the farther length of maintaining that such was the conviction of the framers of the act themselves. While creating and dispensing new qualifications to "male persons," it reserves and perpetuates all franchises in operation at its own date, whether relating to counties or to boroughs; and in continuing to preserve alive and effectual all what are called ancient or reserved rights, which it does, not parenthetically, but by express and separate sections, it drops the word "male" every time it refers to these, and resumes it on every occasion on which it returns to enact a new qualification. What candid mind, interpreting the will of Parliament by its expressed acts, would do other than concede that if it had repeated the word "male" in the continuation of these traditional franchises, it would be restricting what the law and the constitution had left open? The distinction it preserves is too marked, too systematic, and too often repeated to have been adopted per incuriam. There is a settled design apparent throughout; and that is manifestly not to trench on any right of suffrage which had been handed down to us from our ancestors. I refer jurisconsults to sections 24, 25, 31, 32, and 33 of 2nd William IT., cap. 45. "The Reform Act of 1832," observes Sir J. D. Coleridge (Chorlton v. Lings), "in the clauses which create new franchises &hellip; speaks of 'male person,' but section 18, limiting the old, has simply 'person;' so sects. 22, 23, 24, et cet."

As far as concerns these ancient rights, we are therefore referred back to the common, customary, and statute law, as it prevailed before the year 1832. The judgment of the Court of Common Pleas rejecting the claim of women to the franchise assumes that at no period of our history had the sex any right of representation—and this is the dictum which I challenge