Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/28

28 derived from her what she herself never had? Mark—it is not because he has a qualification that he votes. The property is his wife's. If he dies, no process of law or of conveyance is required to re-transfer the qualifying tenement to her. It always was hers. It continues hers notwithstanding her coverture. It is the bare right to vote of which the law constitutes him her proxy—her mandatory—her attorney—to borrow the term used by Dames Packington and Copley. Can a trustee have powers ultra vires of the trust? Can a proxy do that which his author cannot? What is an attorney but one executing a power which another has? Who can impart to others a jus devolutum, who themselves have no jus ?

Groping one's devious way out of the blinking twilight of the law into the "liberal air" and broad daylight of plain English, and the common sense of the lay understanding, may we appeal from the interpreters of Acts to the makers of them If Parliament was satisfied that women never had the franchise, why, for the first time in the whole range of the statutes at large, and for the last, did it introduce the word "male?" Can it point to a single form of legal incapacity as the result of desuetude alone? Go through the whole list, and everyone will be found the creatures of express law, of specific statute, or of express resolution. Not one syllable of any of these has the slightest reference to gender. Where does the Constitution erect a moral or intellectual test of fitness for the office of elector? It confers the franchise not on fitness but on right, as the co-relative of duty and burden. Provision is made in the new Act for those who cannot so much as read the names of the candidates. A felon who has finished his term of servitude may make his mark, and have his representative; but George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, George Sand, or De Stael, have no political functions, because Westminster Hall has declared they are incapable of discharging them.

Mr. Gladstone has warned his fellow-countrymen that America is "passing us at a canter." Of all great powers ours is the weakest in material resources. More than half the food we consume we have to import, and yearly our state of dependence becomes greater. It is on the breed of our men, on our people, on the force of character,the energy of cerebral