The drunken loafer who has not earned a living for years is consulted by the Constitution on questions like the training and upbringing of children, the national settlement of religion in Wales and elsewhere, and as to the best method of dealing with the licensing problem.  But the wife whose industry keeps him and his household from beggary, who pays the rent and taxes which constitute him a voter, who is therefore really responsible for his qualification to vote, is not taken into account in the slightest degree.  I came in contact not long ago with a great girls’ school in the south of England.  It was founded by women, and it is administered by women.  It is one of the most marvelous organizations in the whole country, and yet, when we had, in the year 1906, to give a national verdict on the question of education, the man who split the firewood in that school was asked for his opinion about it, while those ladies were deemed to be absolutely unfit to pass any judgment on it at all.  That is a preposterous and barbarous anachronism, and so long as it lasts our democracy is one-sided and incomplete.  But it will not last long.  No franchise bill can ever again be brought forward in this country without raising the whole problem of whether you are going to exclude more than half the citizens of the land.  Women have entered pretty nearly every sphere of commerce and industry and professional activity and public employment; and there never was a time when the nation stood more in need of the special experience, instincts, and sympathy of womanhood in the management of its affairs.  When women get the vote the horizon of the home will be both brightened and expanded, and their influence on moral and social and educational questions, especially on the temperance question, and possibly on the peace of nations, will be constant and humanizing.

Those are a few of the reasons why I favor woman suffrage.  But because I favor it I do not therefore hold myself bound to either speak or vote for any and every suffrage bill that may be introduced into Parliament.  I voted against the so-called Conciliation Bill which proposed to give the vote to every woman of property if she chose to take the trouble to get it, and at the same time enfranchise only about one-tenth or one-fifteenth of the working women of the country.  That was simply a roundabout way of doubling the plural voters and no democrat could possibly support it, so long as there remained a single alternative.  The solution that most appeals to me is the one embodied in the Dickinson Bill, that is to say, a measure conferring the vote on women householders and on the wives of married electors; and I believe that it is in that form that woman suffrage will eventually come in this country.  How soon it will come depends very largely on how soon the militants come to their senses.