The next episode in the debate requires a few words of introduction.  The Society had always been in favour of votes for women.  A proposition in the Manifesto, Tract No. 2, published as early as 1884, states that “men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against women,” and in all our publications relating to the franchise or local government the claims of women to equal citizenship were prominently put forward.  But we had published no tract specially on the subject of the Parliamentary Vote for Women.  This was not mere neglect.  In 1893 a committee was appointed “to draw up a tract advocating the claims of women to all civil and political rights at present enjoyed by men,” and in March, 1894, it reported that “a tract had been prepared which the Committee itself did not consider suitable for publication.”  Later the Committee was discharged, and in face of this fiasco nothing further was done.

Mr. Wells took a strong view on the importance of doing something in relation to women and children, though exactly what he proposed was never clear.  He offered to the Society his little book on “Socialism and the Family,” subsequently published by Mr. Fifield, but the Executive Committee declined it precisely because of its vagueness:  they were not disposed to accept responsibility for criticisms on the existing system, unless some definite line of reform was proposed which they could ask the Society to discuss and approve, or at any rate to issue as a well-considered scheme suitable for presentation to the public.

The new Basis proposed by the Special Committee declared that the Society sought to bring about “a reconstruction of the social organisation” by

   (a) promoting transfer of land and capital to the State,

   (b) “enforcing equal citizenship of men and women,

   (c) “substituting public for private authority in the education
   and support of the young.”

Precisely what the last clause meant has never been disclosed.  Mr. Wells in his speech did nothing to elucidate it.  Mr. Shaw in his reply criticised its vagueness and protested against possible interpretations of it.  Mr. Wells stated some time later that he had resigned from the Society because we refused to adopt it.  I do not think that any of his colleagues attached much importance to it, and none of them has attempted to raise the issue since.[37]

Clause (b) was another matter.  Nobody objected to the principle of this, but many demurred to inserting it in the Basis.  We regarded the Basis as a statement of the minimum of Socialism, without which no man had the right to call himself a Socialist.  But there are a few Socialists, such as Mr. Belfort Bax, who are opposed to women’s suffrage, and moreover, however important it be, some of us regard it as a question of Democracy rather than Socialism.  Certainly no one would contend that approval of women’s suffrage was acceptance of a part of the creed of Socialism.  It is a belief compatible with the most thoroughgoing individualism.