On Monday night Mr. Fawcett, M.P. for Brighton, delivered an
address at a church in Blackfriars Road in favour of women's suffrage,—of giving women general political power. We assent to much that Mr. Fawcett said as to the deplorable education of women, and their unfair position for anything like equal com- petition in the race of life. But when all these inequalities are righted, we do not expect, and certainly do not hope, to see women rushing into all the hot competitions as eagerly as men. If recep- tiveness of nature has any meaning at all, women are more recep- tive and less pushing than men by constitution. This is no reason for not giving them an equal educational position, or for not expecting considerable gains from granting that position, but it is a reason for expecting and hoping that the actual practical spheres of women and men will never be in the main identical. They should be equal, but also different. As to political.privileges, we should gladly see them open to women, though not forced upon them, so soon as they are fitted for them. But we do not believe any class in the community so little politically educated at present as women. We waited to give the fran- chise to the artizans, till the artizans had proved by their con- duct in the Lancashire cotton famine and hundreds of co-opera- tive institutions that they had got their political mind. All we say as to women's franchise,—which may eventually yield good results which no one now anticipates, and results wholly consistent with strictly feminine graces,—is, let us ask the same general evidence in their case that we asked in that of the artizans, and not bestow power on pure ignorance.
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