the case of men; and in all fairness we ought not to do so in the case of women.  We have not so ordered it, and we had no right to order it otherwise than we have done.  If we have neglected to give the masses due education, we have no right to withhold the franchise on the strength of that neglect.  Like Frankenstein, we may have made our man ill: but we cannot help his being alive; and if he destroys us, it is our own fault.

If any reply, that to add a number of uneducated women-voters to the number of uneducated men-voters will be only to make the danger worse, the answer is:—That women will be always less brutal than men, and will exercise on them (unless they are maddened, as in the first French Revolution, by the hunger and misery of their children) the same softening influence in public life which they now exercise in private; and, moreover, that as things stand now, the average woman is more

educated, in every sense of the word, than the average man; and that to admit women would be to admit a class of voters superior, not inferior, to the average.

Startling as this may sound to some, I assert that it is true.

We must recollect that the just complaints of the insufficient education of girls proceed almost entirely from that ‘lower-upper’ class which stocks the professions, including the Press; that this class furnishes only a small portion of the whole number of voters; that the vast majority belong (and will belong still more hereafter) to other classes, of whom we may say, that in all of them the girls are better educated than the boys.  They stay longer at school—sometimes twice as long.  They are more open to the purifying and elevating influences of religion.  Their brains are neither muddled away with drink and profligacy, or narrowed by the one absorbing aim of turning a penny into five farthings.  They have a far larger share than their brothers of that best of all practical and moral educations, that of family life.  Any one who has had experience of the families of farmers and small tradesmen, knows how boorish the lads are, beside the intelligence, and often the refinement, of their sisters.  The same rule holds (I am told) in the manufacturing districts.  Even in the families of employers, the young ladies are, and have been for a generation or two, far more highly cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure.  The same, I believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony, called ‘the ruling class.’  I suspect that the average young lady

already learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public school.  Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the so-called ‘marriage market,’ must remember this—that the great majority of those who will have votes will be either widows, who have long passed all that, have had experience, bitter and wholesome, of the realities of life, and have most of them given many pledges to the State in the form of children; or women who, by various circumstances, have been early withdrawn from the competition of this same marriage-market, and have settled down into pure and honourable celibacy, with full time, and generally full inclination, to cultivate and employ their own powers.  I know not what society those men may have lived in who are in the habit of sneering at ‘old maids.’  My experience has led me to regard them with deep respect, from the servant retired on her little savings to the unmarried sisters of the rich and the powerful, as a class pure, unselfish, thoughtful, useful, often experienced and able; more fit for the franchise, when they are once awakened to their duties as citizens, than the average men of the corresponding class.  I am aware that such a statement will be met with ‘laughter, the unripe fruit of wisdom.’  But that will not affect its truth.

Let me say a few words more on this point.  There are those who, while they pity the two millions and a half, or more, of unmarried women earning their own bread, are tempted to do no more than pity them, from the mistaken notion that after all it is their own fault, or at least the fault of nature.  They ought (it is fancied) to have been married: or at least they ought to have been good-looking enough and clever enough to

be married.  They are the exceptions, and for exceptions we cannot legislate.  We must take care of the average article, and let the refuse take care of itself.  I have put plainly, it may be somewhat coarsely, a belief which I believe many men hold, though they are too manly to express it.  But the belief itself is false.  It is false even of the lower classes.  Among them, the cleverest, the most prudent, the most thoughtful, are those who, either in domestic service or a few—very few, alas!—other callings, attain comfortable and responsible posts which they do not care to leave for any marriage, especially when that marriage puts the savings of their life at the mercy of the husband—and they see but too many miserable instances of what that implies.  The very refinement which they have acquired in domestic service often keeps them from wedlock.  ‘I shall never marry,’ said an admirable nurse, the daughter of a common agricultural labourer.  ‘After being so many years among gentlefolk, I could not live with a man who was not a scholar, and did not bathe every day.’

And if this be true of the lower class, it is still more true of some, at least, of the classes above them.  Many a ‘lady’ who remains unmarried does so, not for want of suitors, but simply from nobleness of mind; because others are dependent on her for support; or because she will not degrade herself by marrying for marrying’s sake.  How often does one see all that can make a woman attractive—talent, wit, education, health, beauty,—possessed by one who never will enter holy wedlock.  ‘What a loss,’ one says, ‘that such a woman should not have married, if it were but for the sake of the children she might have borne to the State.’  ‘Perhaps,’ answer wise women of the world, ‘she did not see any one whom she could condescend to many.’

And thus it is that a very large proportion of the spinsters of England, so far from being, as silly boys and wicked old men fancy, the refuse of their sex, are the very élite thereof; those who have either sacrificed themselves for their kindred, or have refused to sacrifice themselves to that longing to marry at all risks of which women are so often and so unmanly accused.

Be all this as it may, every man is bound to bear in mind, that over this increasing multitude of ‘spinsters,’ of women who are either self-supporting or desirous of so being, men have, by mere virtue of their sex, absolutely no rights at all.  No human being has such a right over them as the husband has (justly or unjustly) over the wife, or the father over the daughter living in his house.  They are independent and self-supporting units of the State, owing to it exactly the same allegiance as, and neither more nor less than, men who have attained their majority.  They are favoured by no privilege, indulgence, or exceptional legislation from the State, and they ask none.  They expect no protection from the State save that protection for life and property which every man, even the most valiant, expects, since the carrying of side-arms has gone out of fashion.  They prove themselves daily, whenever they have simple fair play, just as capable as men of not being a