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 voting Conservative or Liberal we may indirectly have remotely influenced the general trend of legislation.

"Well but"—the suffragist will here rejoin—"is it not at any rate true that in the drafting of statutes and the framing of judicial decisions man has always nefariously discriminated against woman?"

The question really supplies its own answer. It will be obvious to every one who considers that the drafting of statutes and the formulating of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a procedure as that of drawing up the rules to govern a game; and it offers hardly more opportunity for discriminating between man and woman.

There are, however, three questions in connexion with which the law can and does make a distinction between man and woman.

The first is that of sexual relations: rape, divorce, bastardy, and the age of consent. In connexion with rape, it has never been alleged that the law is not sufficiently severe. It is, or