3 MAY 1873, Page 2

The annual Amazonian debate took place on Wednesday, when the

women's suffrage party diminished the majority against them by 12, as compared with the vote of last year, the Bill being rejected by 222 votes to 155. Lord John Manners and Mr. Henley both supported the Bill on this occasion, Mr. Henley taking the ground that after the municipal franchise had been given to women the Parliamentary franchise logically follows, and avowing his desire for the support of the Conservative feeling which women would be sure to bring to elections. Our own im- pression is that women would lean to extreme views, whether Right or Left. In the French Revolution, so often referred to in the debate, the women certainly were not moderators, and we confess that in Mr. Henley's sense of the meaning of Conservative,'—eober, matter-of-fact, hostile to 'new-fangled' notions,—we should expect

-that women would not be the allies he hopes for. Mr. Greene told

story,—apparently to illustrate the danger of the family differ- ences which the concession of women's suffrage might introduce, —of a poor woman in his parish who had a very bad husband, and whom the clergyman exhorted to speak softly to her husband, and so "heap coals of fire on his head." Being afterwards asked by her counsellor how domestic matters were going on, she replied, " I thought a good deal about putting fire on my husband's head, but I tried boiling-water." That woman clearly was not a moderate ; she had the intuitions of a petroleuse.