A woman grocer is as much interested in Sugar Bounties and in Tea-taxes as her male rivals.
A woman housekeeper needs as much to be protected against the imposition of frozen home or foreign meat, at fresh English prices, as does the burdened British farmer.
All women suffer as much in War, and gain as much by Peace as men do.
Noxious trades, impure air, bad drainage, poison women as they do men. Women have as much interest in the character and wisdom of the members of the house as men have, because they also suffer from the consequences of their unwise actions. How, therefore, can anyone say—these things do not concern women?
It would be better for men too, if women were represented. They would then understand the meaning of Justice, and enjoy the return blessings of fair-play. They would discover that in the very difference of women lies one great argument for their being consulted.
If public-spirited women continue to be denied the power of offering their judgment in the consensus of public opinion on political matters, the nation will be the poorer. It will ere long recognise this. But it does not yet.
How can any Assembly be said to be “Representative of the People,” when the best half of the People are not represented there; the best half in numbers, through the working out of the modern doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest; the best half by Statistics, as there are five times as many male criminals as female; the best half, by the position in which God placed woman at the Creation, at the Fall, and the Redemption. If it starts under false pretences how can it do the best possible to itself?
There is a strange suggestive duality even in our physical frame. We have two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, many other dualities, and two lobes of the brain to control them. If by any cause one lobe of the brain is injured, it is the other side of the body that becomes paralysed, but the whole body suffers with its members. If men persist in using only one eye, they not only see things out of focus, but restrict their range of vision. They can only see things on the near side of them. A Government that only uses the masculine eye, and sees but the masculine side of things, is at best but a one-eyed Government. The builder that only toils with one hand impoverishes himself, and makes meaner the design of the great Architect. The traveller that through some brain-sick fancy imagines one of his feet to be decrepit, can get along but by hops and jerks, or by using crutches made of dead wood, instead of living limbs that make motion graceful, equal, and rapid. Yet thus men do, wondering, meanwhile, that the “times are out of joint.”
Let them apply reason to their time-worn aphorisms, and the scales of justice to their out-worn Customs. Let them look at Humanity as it is, and as it ought to be.
Two comparisons will help them in the review, their comparison with their ancestors in this respect, and their comparison with “the perfect man in Christ Jesus,” and his “perfect Law of Liberty.”