Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/566

 merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit."

"Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that. But now, tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?"

"It would be raised"

"No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and if you 'raise' us we lose our means of livelihood. How are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?"

The suffragist's face contracted.

"Everything takes time," she faltered. "Just as I couldn't promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up the next day, I can't say that of course your case is more difficult than any other, because  because"

"Because," said Victoria coldly, "I represent a social necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the asking for every human being—work, mark you, fitted to strength and ability—so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisure class who draw luxury from the labor of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John's Wood to Pekin."