Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/16

16 1. The Act of 1832 reserved and continued, with modifications immaterial to the question, all the pre-existent electoral qualifications.

2. In no Act before or since, is there any mention of gender as a condition precedent to the franchise.

3. Freeholders, tenants in ancient demesne, resiants, inhabitants, burgage tenants, potwallers, scot and lot occupiers, burgesses, and other holders of ancient rights," were entitled to vote in the election of members to serve in Parliament for such counties, cities, and boroughs as retained the franchises peculiar to and the accustomed qualification of each respectively; and women were and are freeholders in counties, burgesses, inhabitants, owners and tenants, "substantial householders" in cities and towns, and are therefore embraced within the category of the enfranchised orders.

4. There is no judgment of the Common Law, nor provision in any statute of the realm, prior to that of 1832, and, as I will show, not even in that, declaring gender a legal incapacity. Common Law and statute are equally silent on the subject.

5. The only considerations the Court of Common Pleas and its followers can oppose to these unanswerable propositions are, that women have never been known in the course of our parliamentary history to exercise the suffrage, and that their votes have never been tendered, or at least received, by the returning officer.

But—

1. The proof of non-user must lie on those who urge the plea; and what judicial evidence is there to warrant the assertion? I have given chapter and verse for the right of females to vote. If it be admitted that they are freeholders, inhabitants, burgesses, and that the franchise is given to these orders, my evidence prima facie of their title is complete; and if it is to be cut down by the plea of non-user, the desuetude must be not merely conjectured, but judicially proved.

2. Is it capable of proof? What is it that has to be established? The application of the doctrine of prescription to such a subject is sheer nonsense. If the women of Aylesbury never voted, is that proof that those of Cricklade never can? How do you or I or anybody know that women never voted? What is to be the term of desuetude that is to shut the door upon the sex?