On Friday week Lord Cromer addressed a meeting in the
Free- Trade Hall, Manchester, convened by the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, and presided over by Lord Sheffield. He insisted that woman suffrage was pre-eminently an Imperial question, because the grant of the vote would inevitably impair the qualities required in dealing with Imperial issues, and he recalled the words of Queen Victoria, who said : "We women are not made for governing." The "silent women" of the country were imploring the electors to save them from their more loquacious sisters, and not impose a burden on them which they rejected and felt they were incapable of bearing. The grant of the suffrage, again, would inevitably impair the virility of the nation in its international struggle with our most formidable competitor, Germany. Lord Cromer strongly demurred to the view that the question could be settled by such a measure as that of Mr. Shackleton. They must either enfranchise all the women or none. The issue really was whether we were to transfer the government of this great Empire to women, whose numbers exceeded those of the men in the United Kingdom by no fewer than one million three hundred thousand.
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