[To xas Sorrel, or Tax - Srscr.wor4"7 Si,—In your last issue
you honour the question of women's suffrage by devoting your first article to the subject. _After the usual compliments, you say that you would deny political power to women simply because women are not men, and that if political power was granted to them there would almost necessarily be a conflict between the sexes, "the most terrible and most anarchic of which the human intellect can con- ceive." Women, you go on to say, are more conscientious than men, and will not compromise when it is a question of right and wrong. You therefore seem to imply that if con- science conflicts with politics, it must go to the wall. It seems to me that both these propositions are in the highest degree disputable. In municipal and other elections it is not found that women all range themselves on one side. There is, I should think, as much variety in the opinions of women as in the opinions of men. Can you, Sir, point to any part of the world where this terrible struggle between the sexes has taken place ? But if it did, the stronger would no doubt prevail. Physical strength is on the side of the male Sex; and surely if this fearful conflict should take place, we should be able to hold our own, unless we are as inferior mentally as we are superior physically. If we are superior mentally as well as physically, the struggle would be brief and decisive ; but if we are inferior mentally, that would seem a strange argument indeed for confining the suffrage to our own sex. As to the other argument, that politics may be influenced by conscience, I cannot but earnestly protest, as a minister of religion, against that being considered an evil. It is just because men are so little influenced by conscience that, as you point out in the latter part of your article, they are ready at election-time to give pledges which they never intend to carry out. If such are the arguments employed by a paper which has so long enjoyed a reputation for intellectual independence, the cause which it advocates must assuredly be past praying for. Half the nation is to remain unrepresented In the Imperial Parliament, not because of their mental
inferiority, but because of their possession of a conscience.— [Our correspondent does not appear to have read with any very great attention the article which he criticises. We said that women might take a different view on a question of right and wrong from that taken by men, and that if they did they are so tenacious of their own views on such matters that they would not be willing to yield, but would push those views to the extreme point and without thought of the consequences, thus producing a sex conflict. We by no means assumed that the feminine view would inevitably be the right one, though we gave women all honour for their strong and absolute sense of right and wrong. We should, we need hardly say, protest quite as strongly as Mr. Ball against the influence of conscience being considered an evil. What we deprecate and dread is a conflict of conscience between men and women. Surely men may differ from women on a point of conscience without necessarily being in the wrong.—ED. Spectator.]
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