The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women is met by that sort of hesitation and evasion which is characteristic of politicians who are not sure of their intellectual ground.  A candidate who has just been speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he is heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify the continued exclusion of women from the franchise.  Accordingly a large majority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at the general election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage.  But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave that pledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out.  There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionally dishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final decision is apparently genuine.  They are aware that certain differences exist between men and women, though they do not know what those differences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question of the franchise.  But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future, probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on the other.

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in our explicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by the growing urgency of the problem of race.  The fight for democracy in Europe and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was carried on by men who were thinking only of the European races.  But, during the extension of democracy after 1870, almost all the Great Powers were engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvements in the means of communication were bringing all the races of the world into close contact.  The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote has (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined to nations of European origin.  But there is nothing in the form or history of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government.  Nor can he draw any intelligible and consistent conclusion from the practice of democratic States in giving or refusing the vote to their non-European subjects.  The United States, for instance, have silently and almost unanimously dropped the experiment of negro suffrage.  In that case, owing to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African negro and the white man from North-West Europe, the problem was comparatively simple; but no serious attempt has yet been made at a new solution of it, and the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing with the more subtle racial questions created by the immigration of Chinese and Japanese and Slavs, or by the government of the mixed populations in the Philippines.