4]

The wife of Jacob Bright, who was largely responsible for the Married
Women's Property Bill, presented a review of present suffrage laws;
his sister, Mrs. Priscilla Bright McLaren, wife of Duncan McLaren, M.
P., and the great Abolitionist, Mrs. Elizabeth Pease Nichol of
Edinburgh, sent long and valuable letters. Mrs. McLaren wrote:

I was in Exeter Hall, London, on the day our Parliament
assembled; a prayer-meeting was held there the whole of that day.
Earnest were the intercessions that the hearts of our rulers
might be influenced to repeal every vestige of the Contagious
Diseases Acts; and the women especially prayed that our men might
be led to send representatives to Parliament of much higher
morality than such Acts testified to, and that the eyes of the
women of their country might be opened to see the iniquity of
such legislation. I venture to express that the burden of my
prayer had been, whilst sitting in that meeting, that the eyes of
the women there assembled, and of the women throughout our
country, might be opened to see that we could not expect men who
did not consider morality to be a necessary part of their own
character, to regard it as needful for the men who were to
represent them in Parliament; that we needed a new moral power
to be brought into exercise at our elections, and as Parliament
was meeting that day and one of its first acts would be to bring
in a new reform bill, that we might unite in prayer that the
petitions so long put forth by many of the women of this land,
that their claim to the suffrage should be included in this new
Act for the extended representation of the people, might be
righteously answered; and the power given to women not only to
pray for what was just and right, but to have by the
Parliamentary vote a direct power to promote that higher
legislation which they all so much desired. I know nothing which
calls for more faith and patience than to hear women pleading for
justice, and refusing to help get it in the only legitimate
way....

Whilst we have our anomalies here, you have a glaring
inconsistency in your country. It is not a property qualification
which gives a vote in America. Is not every human being, who is
of age, according to your Constitution, entitled to equal justice
and freedom? Are you wom