And her journals exhibit to us the kind of parliamentary representative she desiderates.  He humbly, hat in hand, asks for his orders from a knot of washerwomen standing arms a-kimbo.[2]

[2] I give, in response to a request, the reference:  Votes for Women, March 18, 1910, p. 381.

(e) Following in the wake of these embittered human beings come troops of girls just grown up.

All these will assure you, these young girls—­and what is seething in their minds is stirring also in the minds in the girls in the colleges and schools which are staffed by unmarried suffragists—­that woman has suffered all manner of indignity and injustice at the hands of man.

And these young girls have been told about the intellectual, and moral, and financial value of woman—­such tales as it never entered into the heart of man to conceive.

The programme of these young women is to be married upon their own terms.  Man shall—­so runs their scheme—­work for their support—­to that end giving up his freedom, and putting himself under orders, for many hours of the day; but they themselves must not be asked to give up any of their liberty to him, or to subordinate themselves to his interests, or to obey him in anything.

To obey a man would be to commit the unpardonable sin.

It is not necessary, in connexion with a movement which proceeds on the lines set out above, any further to labour the point that there is in it an element of mental disorder.  It is plain that it is there.

There is also a quite fatuous element in the programmes of the militant suffragist.  We have this element, for instance, in the doctrine that, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions of the labour market deny it to her, woman ought to receive the same wage as a man for the same work.

This doctrine is fatuous, because it leaves out of sight that, even if woman succeeds in doing the same work as man, he has behind him a much larger reserve of physical strength.  As soon as a time of strain comes, areserve of strength and freedom from periodic indisposition is worth paying extra for.

Fatuous also is the dogma that woman ought to have the same pay for the same work—­fatuous because it leaves out of sight that woman’s commercial value in many of the best fields of work is subject to a very heavy discount by reason of the fact that she cannot, like a male employee, work cheek by jowl with a male employer; nor work among men as a man with his fellow employees.

So much for the woman suffragist’s protest that she can conceive of no reason for a differential rate of pay for man.

Quite as fatuous are the marriage projects of the militant suffragist.  Every woman of the world could tell her—­whispering it into her private ear—­that if a sufficient number of men should come to the conclusion that it was not worth their while to marry except on the terms of fair give-and-take, the suffragist woman’s demands would have to come down.