cases, the best health
of her life. Whatever activities she adopts, there is now no question of
depriving the race of her qualities: if they are good qualities, it is
to be hoped they are already represented in members of the rising
generation. The scope of womanhood is now extended. The principles to be
laid down later still apply, but they are entirely compatible with, for
instance, the discharge of legislative functions. The nation does not
yet value its old or elderly women aright. We use as a term of contempt
that which should be a term of respect. Savage peoples are wiser. We
need the wisdom of our older women. It would be well for us to have Mrs.
Fawcett and Mrs. Humphry Ward in Parliament. The distinguished lady who
approves of woman's vote in municipal affairs, and fights hard for her
son's candidature in Parliament, but objects to woman suffrage on the
ground that women should not interfere in politics, could doubtless find
a good reason why women should sit in Parliament; and though she would
scarcely be heeded on matters of political theory, her splendid
championship of Vacation Schools and Play Centres would be more
effective than ever in the House, and might instruct some of her male
_confreres_ as to what politics really is.

The prefatory point here made is, in a word, that the following
doctrines are perhaps less reactionary than the ardent suffragette might
suppose, compatible as they are with an earnest belief in the fitness
and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of
Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a
ridiculous argument against woman suffrage--that it is the precursor of
a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women
being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with
girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than
women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both
sexes might well vote for the elderly women whose existence is somehow
forgotten in this connection.

No chapter will be found devoted to the question of the vote. The
omission is not due to reasons of space, nor to my ever having heard a
good argument against the vote--even the argument that women do not want
it. That women did not want the vote would only show--if it were the
case--how much they needed it. Nor is the omission due to any
lukewarmness in a cause for which I am constantly speaking and