428 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



political power in unfit hands. An analogous stroke of strategy, it 

 seems, is now meditated by the same tacticians in the case of female 

 suffrage, the motion in favor of wiiich is brought forward by one of 

 their supporters, and has already received the adhesion of their chief. 

 The very foundations of society are touched when party tampers with 

 the relations of the sexes. 



In England the proposal at present is to give the suffrage only to 

 unmarried women being householders. But the drawing of this hard- 

 and-fast line is at the outset contested by the champions of women's 

 rights ; and it seems impossible that the distinction should be main- 

 tained. The lodger-franchise is evidently the vanishing-point of the 

 feudal connection between political privilege and the possession of 

 houses or land. The suffrage will become personal in England, as it 

 has elsewhere. If a property qualification remains, it Vf'iW be one 

 embracing all kinds of property: money settled on a married woman 

 for her separate use, as well as the house or lodgings occupied by a 

 -widow or a spinster. In the counties already, married women have 

 qualifications in the form of land settled to their separate use ; and the 

 notion that a spinster in lodgings is specially entitled to the suffrage, 

 as the head of a household, is one of those pieces of metaphysics in 

 •which the politicians who affect to scorn any thing metaphysical are 

 apt themselves unwarily to indulge. If the present motion is carried, 

 the votes of the female householders, with that system of election 

 pledges which is now enabling minorities, and even small minorities, 

 to control national legislation, v/ill form the crow-bar by which the 

 next barrier will be speedily forced. 



Marriage itself, as it raises the position of a woman in the eyes of 

 all but the very radical section of the Woman's Kight party, could 

 hardly be treated as politically penal. And yet an act conferring the 

 suffrage on married women would probably be the most momentous 

 step that could be taken by any legislature, since it would declare the 

 family not to be a j)olitical unit, and for the first time authorize a 

 wife, and make it in certain cases her duty as a citizen, to act publicly 

 in opposition to- her husband. Those at least who hold the family to 

 be w^orth as much as the state will think twice before they concur in 

 such a change. 



With the right of electing must ultimately go the right of being 

 elected. The contempt with which the candidature of Mrs. Victoria 

 Woodhull for the presidency was received by some of the advocates 

 of female suffrage in America only showed that they had not consid- 

 ered the consequences of their own principles. Surely she who gives 

 the mandate is competent herself to carry it. Under the parliamentary 

 system, w^hatever the forms and phrases may be, the constituencies 

 are the supreme arbiters of the national policy, and decide not only 

 who shall be the legislators, but what shall be the course of legislation. 

 They have long virtually appointed the ministers, and now they ap- 



