Last week a women's suffrage meeting took place at the
Hanover- Square Rooms, Sir Robert Anstruther, in the chair. The chairman declared that no other public cause had advanced with such rapid strides since Mr. John Stuart Mill first advocated it in Parliament, and he proceeded to give reasons for the rapidity of that advance. But would it not have been better first to esta- blish the fact of the advance before looking for the explanation of it? Is it not possible that the investigation of reasons may turn out something like that asked for by Charles II. from the Royal Society, namely, the reasons why a tub of water with a living fish in it weighs no heavier than the tub of water without the fish ? Sir R. Anstruther's only evidence for the assumption of a rapid advance, was that the Times has recently written, though not favourably, yet respectfully, and with a good deal of candour, of the case for the concession of women's suffrage,—which is quite true ; but it hardly follows that because the Times has committed the subject to an able man who knows what he is about, and does• not choose to affect a contempt he does not feel, therefore the country is becoming more favourable to the proposal. Sir R.
struther added that the Government would do well to take up the Women's Suffrage measure, and " he believed they would do so,"—the strongest evidence he could have given that the Con- servatives think of female suffrage as a new guarantee for Con- servative victories. Sir R. Anstruther was himself favourable to admitting women even into the House of Commons, and unques- tionably both that, and the admission of married women to the suffrage, are logical corollaries of the rather infinitesimal instal- ment of female rights at present proposed. The same may be said of their admission into the Army and Navy, to which, if we inter- pret rightly Sir -It. Anstruther's panegyric on women's physical strength, he himself is favourable. Were only all the advocates of women's suffrage equally frank and logical, the movement of the women's suffrage fraction would be rapid indeed, but rapidly retrograde.
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