Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/189

 matters of the very gravest importance to himself and his country. No individual outside Parliament has the power directly to initiate legislation. The one method open to the electors at present of showing their disapproval of legislation is to vote one party out and another party in.

This is all that the women claim for themselves. They know perfectly well that they are as little fit as the majority of men to decide questions of policy when the whole of the facts are not at their disposal. Under a system of representative government it is not considered necessary to make the man in the street acquainted with the details of foreign and financial transactions of the gravest complication. By some this is regretted. But it is deemed inadvisable in a country like this, with its crowded populace composed very largely of very poor and hard-worked people, with little time and energy for thought, and with so much in their poor lives to render them easy victims of the corrupter. More than all, in a land where vested interests still hold so many minds in thrall, to alter the present system whereby men choose those who shall make political judgments for them is thought by men of radical temper to be an unwise proposal.

Upon no question is there greater confusion of thought than the confusion which clouds