Mr. Forsyth moved on Wednesday the second reading of the
Bill for removing the political disabilities of women, in a speech in which he repudiated the intention of enabling married women to vote, and ridiculed the notion that women could ever become Members of Parliament,—in short, in a speech intended to show that the wedge was not any thicker at the other end than it is at this. Mr. Leatham resisted the Bill in a vivacious speech, basing his opposition on women's want of reasoning faculties,—a dangerously sweeping objection, when we look at such exhibitions of masculine reasoning faculties as that of the mobs which support the Claimant. Mr. Leatham touched stronger ground when he pointed out the indifference, nay, the dislike of the Majority of women to the measure, and when he maintained that women are really better represented by their husbands and brothers—however imperfectly that may be—than they ever would be by the results of their own votes. Mr. Smollett took the coarse-jocose line against the Bill, touching, of course, and very rudely, on the agitation against the Contagious Diseases Act, and quoting with rather more point Lord Byron's description of women,—
" Men with their heads reflect on this or that,
But women set their hearts on God knows what,"
—and remarking that if the poet had lived till our time, he would have known that they,—or rather, we suspect, a very small hand- ful of them,—now set their hearts on the Lodger Franchise.
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