o determine principles, for principles there are in these matters,
if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on
which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must
hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation
and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic
principles which determine the life and continuance of living things.
Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will
come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a
thousand times in the past.

None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the
present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what
kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of
what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed
women, in some particular time and place, think they want,--or do not
want--under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other
influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds
of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have
never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because
they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds,
none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the
Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that
Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to
be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial
grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed
against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has
been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics
who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds
by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose
it was invented by the Church.

And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are
those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing
and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to
decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones
and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed
choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled
questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It
is argued by vast numbe