Mr. Leonard Courtney, M.P. for Liskeaxd., speaking at the Bristol
Conference of last week on Women's Rights, described a walk in Cheapside some years ago with an imaginative friend, who suddenly becoming possessed by the vision of the ever- flowing stream of life, composed of human beings each occupied with his own thoughts and interests, yet each succeeding the other like successive drops of blood along the arteries, sud- denly proposed to him to step aside down one of the quiet courts which open on the thoroughfare, and "think what all this means." Mr. Courtney told the story in order to get his audience to consider political questions from a some- what wider point of view,—to get them to look at polities as but one aspect of the great stream of human in- terests, and so to see that all women, who affect human interests so profoundly, cannot properly be excluded from the sphere of polities. But no sober opponent of women's suffrage ever wished to exclude their influence from the sphere of poli- tics. On the contrary, most of them regard that influence as of the greatest possible moment, and as having produced 'the greatest results in the past, as well as being destined to produce the greatest results in the future. The only real question is how that influence is best exerted,—whether through men, or directly, —in other words, as an influence, or as an independent right. And for our parts, we believe that it is both more natural and more considerable if confined to the former, than if also exerted in the latter capacity. Unless women are willing to give up their special privileges of sex,—to give up their pro- tected social position,—they must not enter into the thick of the public *struggles of life ; and that they should give up those privileges, seems to us to involve at least as great an evil for men na it would involve also for themselves.
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