6
politically penal" is to put the argument for his view into a neat phrase; but Englishmen have not hitherto been much governed by phrases, and I hope they are not now going to begin to be. The political disqualification which attaches to the military and naval services, as well as to some branches of the civil service, might also be described as a "penal" incident of those honourable callings, but it is nevertheless maintained; and I have no doubt that if people come to believe that it is advantageous to give the suffrage to widows and spinsters, but disadvantageous to extend it to married women, they will set epigrams at defiance, and draw the line exactly where it is drawn in Mr. Forsyth's Bill. Again, I deny altogether that there is anything in the logic of the case that would compel those who have given the suffrage to women, to take the further step of admitting them to Parliament. "Surely," says Mr. Smith, "she who gives the mandate is competent herself to carry it"—on the principle, I suppose, that—
"Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat."
But granting, for argument's sake, that she is competent to carry her own mandate, it still does not follow that she is competent to carry the mandates of other people; and this is what the right to a seat in Parliament means. Indeed it is only quite lately that the law has ceased to distinguish between the right to vote and the right to be elected;[1] and if the distinction no longer exists, its abolition has been due, not in the least to a desire for logical consistency, but simply to the fact that the qualification required by the law for a seat in Parliament was found in practice ineffective for its purpose and in other ways mischievous. If it prove on full examination that the character and circumstances of women are such as to render their admission to Parliament unadvisable on public grounds, those who are in favour of giving them the suffrage will be perfectly within their right in taking their stand at this point, and in refusing to grant them
- ↑ In the case of clergymen, as well as in other cases, the distinction is still maintained.
