In a speech on free-trade, delivered in Covent Garden Theater January 15, 1845, Richard Cobden said:
There are many ladies present, I am happy to say; now, it is a very anomalous fact that they cannot vote themselves, and yet that they have a power of conferring votes upon other people. I wish they had the franchise, for they would often make much better use of it than their husbands.
Again in 1848, in supporting a motion of Mr. Joseph Hume in the House of Commons to the effect that the elective franchise should be extended to all householders, Mr. Cobden said:
A gentleman asked me to support universal suffrage on the ground of principle, and I said to him, if it is a principle that a man should have a vote because he pays taxes, why should not a widow who pays taxes and is liable to serve as church-warden and overseer, have a vote for members of parliament? The gentleman replied that he agreed with me.
In 1853, Mr. W. J. Fox, member for Oldham, in acknowledging the presentation to him by the ladies of Oldham of a signet-ring bearing the inscription, '"Education, the birthright of all," spoke strongly in favor of women having a definite share in political life:
If women have nothing to do with politics, honest men ought to have nothing to do with politics. They keep us pure, simple, just, earnest, in our exertions in politics and public life. 'They have to do with it, because while the portion of man may be by the rougher labors of the head and hands to work out many of the great results of life, the peculiar function of woman is to spread grace and softness, truth, beauty, benignity over all. Nor is woman confined to this. In fact I wish that her direct as well as indirect influence were still larger than it is in the sphere of politics. Why, we trust a woman with the sceptre of the realm, consider her adequate to make peers in the State and bishops in the Church; surely she must be adequate to send her representatives to the lower House. I 'know the time may not have come for mooting a question of this sort; but I know the time will come, and that woman will be something more than a mere adjective to man in political matters. She will become a substantive also. And why not?
Other speakers and writers brought forward the same point. Jeremy Bentham declared he could find no reasons for the exclusion of women, though he laid no stress on the matter; Herbert Spencer in "Social Statics" (1851), Mr. Thomas Hare in his book on "Representation," and Mr. Mill in "Representative Government," all discussed it. In 1843 Mrs. Hugo Reid published an excellent volume, "A Plea for Woman," in which she maintained that "There is no good ground for the assumption that the possession and exercise of political privileges are
