Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/204

 the right to have what the man in the same circumstances and with the same qualifications enjoys. Men and women lunatics and criminals are equally without the right to inflict on the community the consequences of their insanity or their criminality. Men and women of good character and sound understanding have equally the right, as human beings, to share in the government of their native land, provided that neither is to suffer so radically and so completely by the exercise of these rights as to endanger the whole of the community and blight the prospects of the next generation. Race-expediency is a legitimate argument, but its use must be proved to be justifiable before it should be accepted.

Those who use the argument have not proved that they are justified. They have not proved anything. Millions of women have been living in the exercise of every franchise enjoyed by their men. The women of this country have exercised a partial franchise for forty-two years. Nobody could say that a radical alteration for the worse had taken place in the character of voting British women. Those who know the colonial women voters, or the women voters of Norway and Finland, would never dare to assert that the women of these countries are one whit less womanly, even in the narrow sense of that term, less fond of their