t it in a month. But there again, one must remember,
it would be necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to
the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection
to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of
women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women
ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or not; but this is
surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the
destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide
if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people
practically say that females may vote about everything except about
Female Suffrage.

But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and
possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the
matter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real
roots of woman's position in the western state, and the causes of our
existing traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this
purpose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the
mere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much
more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.

*****

II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK

Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or
four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at
least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let
me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner,
or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one
speciality; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral
things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and
while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some
old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.
The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut
throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick
is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to
point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing
pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a
club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an
extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which
the strangest modern views have aris