THE PATERFAMILIAS 121 



or qualification which might be abolished or modified. 

 The property of minors pays the tax, but it is not 

 proposed on that account that children should vote. 

 The property qualifications in use at present are merely 

 a method for excluding certain men, and we might have 

 an intellectual qualification or a muscular qualification 

 for the same purpose. Indeed, we do at present 

 exclude male imbeciles and those who are immature. 

 The reason for extending the Parliamentary vote to a 

 larger and larger body of the male population has been 

 to secure the assent of the strength and manhood of 

 the country to the laws and public acts of the Govern- 

 ment, and to ensure its willing participation in that 

 maintenance of the central Government's decisions by 

 physical force, which is the ultimate and by no means 

 verv remote method by which they are maintained. It 

 does not seem to be likely to be an improvement on 

 our present system that women, who must always be 

 regarded as specially privileged because of their physical 

 weakness, should nevertheless be allowed to influence by 

 the mere number of their votes the decision of questions 

 in which the employment of the physical strength of 

 men acting as defenders of our territory, guardians of 

 the peace, or ministers of the law, is the essential condi- 

 tion of an effective result following on such decision. 



To a naturalist human population does not appear 

 as a number of units of which a few more are female 

 than male but rather as a series of families, consisting 

 of men, women, and children, bound together by a 

 variety of reciprocal services, dependent one on another, 

 ordered and disciplined to a distribution of functions 

 and duties by the tradition and experience of ages. 

 The notion that the paterfamilias is the rightful chief 

 of his wife and children, and that through him they 

 are represented, and should be content to be repre- 

 sented, in the local and greater State Government is 

 one of long standing in civilised Europe. The powers 



