Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/205

 Our case, I say, is so simple, that it is like having to prove that one and one are two. Indeed, this is precisely what the opposition denies. It says that one and one are not two; that in politics one man and one woman are only one, and man is that one. Savages are notoriously bad at arithmetic, but in the Colenso of civilisation it is written that one man and one woman are two persons. Like most simple truths, this axiom of spiritual arithmetic has taken the human race a long time to arrive at; but, thank Heaven, we are there at last! Woman is a separate and individual personality; a human soul, and, what is more to the point, a tax-payer. Even marriage cannot extinguish her. She is no longer a mere appendage to her lord, united and fused, like Campbell with Bannerman. The Married Woman's Property Act gives her the right to her separate property; with property goes taxation, and with taxation must and shall go representation.

What are the reasons for refusing this representation, for depriving half the qualified population of political power? Is this half, then, exactly the same as the other half, so that the other half sufficiently represents it? Quite the contrary. Woman has a peculiar relation to a number of problems; her standpoint, her interests, differ vastly from man's. How dare we then leave her out of the reckoning? Take only the last great political measure with which the male half of the population has been grappling, and which they have discussed with such masculine balance, such freedom from hysteria—I need hardly say I mean the Education Bill. If ever there was a subject on which woman had a right to a voice, it was surely this. You all know what happened to that Bill—what was the result of all those months of sane masculinity, all those torrents of temperate talk in both Houses of Parliament. Nothing; absolutely nothing. If anything could show the utter unfitness of men for public life, it