Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/18

18, liberi tenentes, resiants. Is it because freeholders are men that they vote No. It is because men are freeholders. There was probably a time when Irishmen and Scotchmen were unknown in English boroughs or counties as voters. Why were not the first to poll estopped?

3. Again I postulate, on what earthly ground is sex picked out as a disqualification of adults possessing in other respects all the legal elements of franchisement? The suffrage is a public right, the highest known to the law. The people acquire their privileges for each individual, and for all. Women are the major part of the community. If the general public, by usage, acquire a right, can nobody enjoy it who does not first of all prove that he has been in the use personally to claim its exercise? The title of custom, achieved by the habitude of some who have enjoyed it, accrues to those who have never asserted the privilege. Because some men have polled, many men alike qualified who have never polled are entitled to vote, even although they have never been known to do so. Women are human. They belong to our common nature—sprung ex humo—like men. Rights acquired by the one sex enure to the other; they are both equally citizens and subjects, amenable to the same laws, liable to the same burdens, which are the co-relatives of representative rights. That men have voted, so far from being a reason for confining public rights to the sex, is actually the foundation for the plea that by their assertion of them individually they have imparted and extended them to those who have not—a part of the public have acquired them for the whole.

The judgment of the Court of Common Pleas proceeds on Justice Bovill's two propositions, that "Women are not included in these words, 'every man,' in the Act;" and secondly, "Women are subject to legal incapacity." The last dictum I will examine first. Does any statute declare it? Does any resolution of the House of Commons hint at it? Does any judgment of our courts of law express it? Aliens, lunatics, outlaws, peers, servants of the crown, the constabulary, minors—for every incapacity attaching to individuals there is the warrant of enactment, resolution, or decision. Chapter and verse can be given for each. But what Act, committee, or court has ever said that women are under a legal incapacity to vote? Is