ffrage.
He was an anti-suffragist, partly because he was a democrat. The
suffrage agitation in England was conducted by a handful of women,
mainly of the upper classes; and it gave Cecil Chesterton immense
pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words, "Votes for
Ladies." G.K. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing
harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social
reform. If the vast majority of women did not want votes it was
undemocratic to force votes upon them. Also, if rich men had
oppressed poor men all through the course of history, it was
exceedingly probable that rich women would also oppress poor women.
Both in _What's Wrong With the World_ and in debating on the subject,
Chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that
women were inferior to men and what was called the physical force
argument. But he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all
(which it probably did not in the England he was living in), it meant
that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal
woman dislikes and rather despises.

All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and
grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon
our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss
Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were
wrong and all the men were right. . . . We told our wives that
Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never
crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that
everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said
that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the
idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those
things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr.
Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well
that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should
be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew
it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it.
Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the
nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. . . .*

[* From chapter VII, _The Modern Surrender_.]

All the agitated reformers who were running about and offering their
various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone
very