If, for instance, burglary is placed in a class apart from larceny, it is discriminated from it because this distinction is demanded by considerations of public advantage.  But considerations of utility would not countenance, and by consequence Justice would not accept, a classification of theft into theft committed by a poor man and theft committed by a rich man.

The conception of Justice is thus everywhere interfused with considerations of utility and expediency.

It will have become plain that if we have in view the justice which is administered in the courts—­we may here term it Juridical Justice—­then the question as to whether it is just to refuse the suffrage to woman will be determined by considering whether the classification of men as voters and of women as non-voters is in the public interest.  Put otherwise, the question whether it would be just that woman should have a vote would require the answer “Yes” or “No,” according as the question whether it would be expedient or inexpedient that woman should vote required the answer “Yes” or “No.”  But it would be for the electorate, not for the woman suffragist, to decide that question.

There is, as already indicated, another principle which passes under the name of Justice.  I have in view the principle that in the distribution of wealth or political power, or any other privileges which it is in the power of the State to bestow, every man should share equally with every other man, and every woman equally with every man, and that in countries where Europeans and natives live side by side, these latter should share all privileges equally with the white—­the goal of endeavour being that all distinctions depending upon natural endowment, sex, and race should be effaced.

We may call this principle the Principle of Egalitarian Equity—­first, because it aims at establishing a quite artificial equality; secondly, because it makes appeal to our ethical instincts, and claims on that ground to override the distinctions of which formal law takes account.

But let us reflect that we have here a principle which properly understood, embraces in its purview all mankind, and not mankind only but also the lower animals.  That is to say, we have here a principle, which consistently followed out, would make of every man and woman in primis [at first] a socialist; then a woman suffragist; then a philo-native, negrophil, and an advocate of the political rights of natives and negroes; and then, by logical compulsion ant anti-vivisectionist, who accounts it unjust to experiment on an animal; a vegetarian, who accounts it unjust to kill animals for food; and findly one who, like the Jains, accounts it unjust to take the life of even verminous insects.

If we accept this principle of egalitarian equity as of absolute obligation, we shall have to accept along with woman’s suffrage all the other “isms” believed in, and agitated for, by the cranks who are so numerously represented in the ranks of woman suffragists.