representative and interesting deputations
that ever went to Downing Street. It numbered over fifty and every
woman in it represented a great section of industrial and war
workers--Miss Mary MacArthur, the Trade Union Leader was there, and
Miss Margaret Bondfield, Mrs. Flora Annie Steele, the authoress; Lady
Forbes Robertson, for actresses; Miss Adelaide Anderson, our
Chief Women Factory Inspector; Mrs. Oliver Strachey, Parliamentary
Honourable Secretary of the National Union, whose work has been
tireless and invaluable in the House; a woman munition worker, a woman
conductor, a railway woman worker, a woman chemist, a woman from a
bank, a clerk, a shipyard worker, a nurse, a V.A.D., an eminent
woman Doctor, a peeress in Lady Cowdray, who has done so much for the
British Women's Hospitals and so many other war objects, and women
representatives of every calling in the nation at peace and war. Mrs.
Pankhurst, who has been very active in war work, was also present on
the Premier's invitation, and Mrs. Fawcett brought a Welshwoman who
made her plea in her own language, the Premier's own, too, and the one
he loves to hear. In his reply, he assured them the bill would contain
a measure of enfranchisement for women as drafted, and he was quite
sure the House would carry it.

The recommendations of the Speakers' Conference were an agreed
compromise, and the Representation of the People Bill, as it was
called on its introduction, has gone through very much on the lines
of the recommendations. It arranges for postal or proxy votes for
the soldier, the sailor and the merchant seaman, it simplifies the
qualifications for men, it retains the University vote for men and
extends it to women, and it enfranchises women of thirty years of age
on a residence qualification, and all wives of voters of the same age.
It disfranchises, for the time, the conscientious objector who will do
no national service. The age at which our men vote is twenty-one. The
higher age of the women was a compromise, which was accepted by all
women's societies and by labour women, though it was not the terms
they stood for--equality.

If we had it on the same terms as men, we should very greatly
outnumber the men. There were over a million more women than men
before the war and a new electorate greater than all the men's numbers
brought in at once was not considered wise. To press for it would have
wrecked our chances.

This measure enfranchises six million