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counsel, we instinctively feel, would be, if not superfluous and impertinent, at least precarious. A man sanely and rightly refuses to have his activities secluded into the accident of sex. We have learnt the lesson—and to this language bears unconscious witness—that "man" connotes and comprises "humanity." Dare we say as much of "woman"? The whole Woman's Movement is, to my mind, just the learning of that lesson. It is not an attempt to arrogate man's prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize woman's privilege of womanhood: it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity. On the banners of every suffrage society, one motto, and one only, should be blazoned:—
Homo sum, humani nihil (ne suffragium quidem)[1] a me alienum puto.
In the early phases of the woman's movement this point was not, I think, to any of us quite clear. The beginnings of a movement are always dark and half unconscious, characterised rather by a blind unrest and sense of discomfort than by a clear vision of the means of relief. Woman had been told ad nauseam that she
- ↑ To anyone who has patience to read this letter to the end it will, I hope, be sufficiently clear that I wish to emphasise rather the importance of the general movement for woman's emancipation than the particular question of the vote. The words of Terence chosen for my motto mark my attitude: "I am a human being, nothing that is human do I account alien." But that there may be no ambiguity I have allowed myself the addition of a parenthesis, "not even a vote"—ne suffragium quidem.
