Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/222

 body of women tolerating the sort of thing that goes on in the House of Commons, where men are allowed to go on repeating themselves and other people, for interminable weary hours, what time they are lamenting the congestion of business. Women are not so much taken up with votes of thanks and compliments; vested interests are less their concern.

The growth of humaner notions is both the fruit and the promise of comradeship; it is seen in the change of ideas about education and about crime and will appear in the ideas about war. People are realising that many vices are the result of the absence of healthy pleasures. We shall not need to punish so much for cruelty, drink, and sexual offences, when we have given people other things to think about and live for; nor for idleness and theft, when we have made employment safe. The reforms of the future are going to be constructive, not punitive, and in all these women's gifts will be priceless.

Men who wish to keep women in subjection justify themselves by two claims: (1) Those of men, their needs and appetites; (2) those of children. With regard to the needs of men, it is certainly essential that women should understand them, else they will be as stupid about men as men have been about women, and few conditions are so fertile in suffering as stupidity. The men, therefore, who, like Sir Almroth Wright, declare that men will not tolerate epicene institutions, are hope-