to take a
part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are
allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as men;
and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be any
inferiority. Exactly where and in proportion as women's capacities
for government have been tried, in that proportion have they been
found adequate.'

Though the demands of women just now are generally urged in the order
of--first, employment, then education, and lastly, the franchise, I have
dealt principally with the latter, because I sincerely believe that it,
and it only, will lead to their obtaining a just measure of the two
former. Had I been treating of an ideal, or even a truly civilised
polity, I should have spoken of education first; for education ought to
be the necessary and sole qualification for the franchise. But we have
not so ordered it in England in the case of men; and in all fairness we
ought not to do so in the case of women. We have not so ordered it, and
we had no right to order it otherwise than we have done. If we have
neglected to give the masses due education, we have no right to withhold
the franchise on the strength of that neglect. Like Frankenstein, we may
have made our man ill: but we cannot help his being alive; and if he
destroys us, it is our own fault.

If any reply, that to add a number of uneducated women-voters to the
number of uneducated men-voters will be only to make the danger worse,
the answer is:--That women will be always less brutal than men, and will
exercise on them (unless they are maddened, as in the first French
Revolution, by the hunger and misery of their children) the same
softening influence in public life which they now exercise in private;
and, moreover, that as things stand now, the average woman is more
educated, in every sense of the word, than the average man; and that to
admit women would be to admit a class of voters superior, not inferior,
to the average.

Startling as this may sound to some, I assert that it is true.

We must recollect that the just complaints of the insufficient education
of girls proceed almost entirely from that 'lower-upper' class which
stocks the professions, including the Press; that this class furnishes
only a small portion of the whole number of voters; that the vast
majority belong (and will belong still more hereafter) to other classes,
of whom we may say, that in all of them the girls are