The House of Commons discussed on Monday an amendment to
the Reform Bill, proposing to enfranchise every soldier or sailor who had seen active service and had reached the age of nineteen— the official minimum age for enlistment. The Service Members supported the proposal on the ground that if a soldier is old enough to fight, he is old enough to vote—an epigrammatic principle which is double-edged, and, incidentally; implies that woman suffrage is unsound. Mr. Herbert Samuel, who expressed much adverse Liberal opinion, argued that a minimum age of nineteen was illogical. If every fighter were to be a voter, then the midshipmen and- ships' boys of sixteen or less, like Jack Cornwall, ought to he enfranchised. The Government agreed to reconsider the matter before the Report stage, on the understanding that the next election was to be regarded as exceptional. Here we need only remark that every limitation of the franchise might be denounced as illogical and unfair. Our old legal rule that a boy attains responsible manhood at twenty-one is not lightly to be set aside.
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