I pass now to the two most familiar grievances of the suffragist; the grievance that the virtuous and intelligent woman has no vote, while the male drunkard has; and the grievance that the woman of property has no vote, while her male underlings have.

All that is worth while saying on these points is that the suffragist is here manufacturing grievances for herself, first, by reasoning from the false premiss that every legal distinction which happens to press hardly upon a few individuals ought for that to be abrogated; and, secondly, by steady leaving out of sight that logical inconsistencies can, for the more part, be got rid of only at the price of bringing others into being.

The man who looks forward to the intellectual development of woman must be brought near to despair when he perceives that practically every woman suffragist sees in every hard case arising in connexion with a legal distinction affecting woman, an insult and example of the iniquity of man-made laws, or a logical inconsistency which could with a very little good-will be removed.

We have come now to the last item on our list, to the grievance that woman has to submit herself to “man-made laws.”

This is a grievance which well rewards study.  It is worth study from the suffragist point of view, because it is the one great injury under which all others are subsumed.  And it is worth studying from the anti-suffragist point of view, because it shows how little the suffragist understands of the terms she employs; and how unreal are the wrongs which she resents.

Quite marvelously has the woman suffragist in this connexion misapprehended; or would she have us say misrepresented?

The woman suffragist misapprehends—­it will be better to assume that she “misapprehends”—­when she suggests that we, the male electors, have framed the laws.

In reality the law which we live under—­and the law in those States which have adopted either the English, or the Roman law—­descends from the past.  It has been evolved precedent, by precedent, by the decisions of generation upon generation of judges, and it has for centuries been purged by amending statutes.  Moreover we, the present male electors—­the electors who are savagely attacked by the suffragist for our asserted iniquities in connexion with the laws which regulate sexual relations—­have never in our capacity as electors had any power to alter an old, or to suggest a new law; except only in so far as by voting Conservative or Liberal we may indirectly have remotely influenced the general trend of legislation.

“Well but”—­the suffragist will here rejoin—­“is it not at any rate true that in the drafting of statutes and the framing of judicial decisions man has always nefariously discriminated against woman?”

The question really supplies its own answer.  It will be obvious to every one who considers that the drafting of statutes and the formulating of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a procedure as that of drawing up the rules to govern a game; and it offers hardly more opportunity for discriminating between man and woman.