given to spending their wives’ earnings in drink, and personally maltreating them; and least likely—to judge from the actions of certain trades—to admit women to free competition for employment.  Further extension of the suffrage will, perhaps, in a very few years, admit many thousands more.  And it is no wonder if refined and educated women, in an age which is disposed to see in the possession of a vote the best means of self-defence, should ask for votes, for the defence, not merely of themselves, but of their lowlier sisters, from the tyranny of men who are as yet—to the shame of the State—most of them altogether uneducated.

As for the reasonableness of such a demand, I can only say—what has been said elsewhere—that the present state of things, ‘in which the franchise is considered

as something so important and so sacred that the most virtuous, the most pious, the most learned, the most wealthy, the most benevolent, the most justly powerful woman, is refused it, as something too precious for her; and yet it is entrusted, freely and hopefully, to any illiterate, drunken, wife-beating ruffian who can contrive to keep a home over his head,’ is equally unjust and absurd.

There may be some sufficient answer to the conclusion which conscience and common sense, left to themselves, would draw from this statement of the case as it now stands: but none has occurred to me which is not contrary to the first principle of a free government.

This I presume to be: that every citizen has a right to share in choosing those who make the laws; in order to prevent, as far as he can, laws being made which are unjust and injurious to him, to his family, or to his class; and that all are to be considered as ‘active’ citizens, save the criminal, the insane, or those unable to support themselves.  The best rough test of a man’s being able to support himself is, I doubt not, his being able to keep a house over his head, or, at least, a permanent lodging; and that, I presume, will be in a few years the one and universal test of active citizenship, unless we should meanwhile obtain the boon of a compulsory Government education, and an educational franchise founded thereon.  But, it must be asked—and answered also—What is there in such a test, even as it stands now, only partially applied, which is not as fair for women as it is for men?  ‘Is it just that an educated man, who is able independently to earn his own livelihood, should have a vote: but that an equally

educated woman, equally able independently to earn her own livelihood, should not?  Is it just that a man owning a certain quantity of property should have a vote in respect of that property: but that a woman owning the same quantity of property, and perhaps a hundred or a thousand times more, should have no vote?’  What difference, founded on Nature and Fact, exists between the two cases?

If it be said that Nature and Fact (arguments grounded on aught else are to be left to monks and mediæval jurists) prove that women are less able than men to keep a house over their head, or to manage their property, the answer is that Fact is the other way.  Women are just as capable as men of managing a large estate, a vast wealth.  Mr. Mill gives a fact which surprised even him—that the best administered Indian States were those governed by women who could neither read nor write, and were confined all their lives to the privacy of the harem.  And any one who knows the English upper classes must know more than one illustrious instance—besides that of Miss Burdett Coutts, or the late Dowager Lady Londonderry—in which a woman has proved herself able to use wealth and power as well, or better, than most men.  The woman at least is not likely, by gambling, horseracing, and profligacy, to bring herself and her class to shame.  Women, too, in every town keep shops.  Is there the slightest evidence that these shops are not as well managed, and as remunerative, as those kept by men?—unless, indeed, as too often happens, poor Madame has her Mantalini and his vices to support, as well as herself and her children.  As for the woman’s power of supporting herself and keeping up at least a lodging

respectably, can any one have lived past middle age without meeting dozens of single women, or widows, of all ranks, who do that, and do it better and more easily than men, because they do not, like men, require wine, beer, tobacco, and sundry other luxuries?  So wise and thrifty are such women, that very many of them are able, out of their own pittance, to support beside themselves others who have no legal claim upon them.  Who does not know, if he knows anything of society, the truth of Mr. Butler’s words?—‘It is a very generally accepted axiom, and one which it seems has been endorsed by thoughtful men, without a sufficiently minute examination into the truth of it, that a man—in the matter of maintenance—means generally a man, a wife and children; while a woman means herself alone, free of dependence.  A closer inquiry into the facts of life would prove that conclusions have been too hastily adopted on the latter head.  I believe it may be said with truth that there is scarcely a female teacher in England, who is not working for another or others besides herself,—that a very large proportion are urged on of necessity in their work by the dependence on them of whole families, in many cases of their own aged parents,—that many hundreds are keeping broken-down relatives, fathers, and brothers, out of the workhouse, and that many are widows supporting their own children.  A few examples, taken at random from the lists of governesses applying to the Institution in Sackville Street, London, would illustrate this point.  And let it be remembered that such cases are the rule, and not the exception.  Indeed, if the facts of life were better known, the hollowness of this defence of the inequality of payment would become manifest; for it

is in theory alone that in families man is the only bread-winner, and it is false to suppose that single women have no obligations to make and to save money as sacred as those which are imposed on a man by marriage; while there is this difference, that a man may avoid such obligation if he pleases, by refraining from marriage, while the poverty of parents, or the dependence of brothers and sisters, are circumstances over which a woman obliged to work for others has no control.’

True: and, alas! too true.  But what Mr. Butler asserts of governesses may be asserted, with equal truth, of hundreds of maiden aunts and maiden sisters who are not engaged in teaching, but who spend their money, their time, their love, their intellect, upon profligate or broken-down relations, or upon their children; and who exhibit through long years of toil, anxiety, self-sacrifice, a courage, a promptitude, a knowledge of business and of human nature, and a simple but lofty standard of duty and righteousness, which if it does not fit them for the franchise, what can?

It may be, that such women would not care to use the franchise, if they had it.  That is their concern, not ours.  Voters who do not care to vote may be counted by thousands among men; some of them, perhaps, are wiser than their fellows, and not more foolish; and take that method of showing their wisdom.  Be that as it may, we are no more justified in refusing a human being a right, because he may not choose to exercise it, than we are in refusing to pay him his due, because he may probably hoard the money.

The objection that such women are better without a vote,