FEMALE SUFFRAGE.
The Bill for removing the Electoral Disabilities of Women has received less attention than the subject deserves. A good deal of personal pressure has been applied in favour of the Bill, and there are probably not a few among its pledged supporters who are far from seeing clearly all the consequences of their vote. The very foundations of society are touched when change is proposed in the relations of the sexes.
In England the proposal at present is to give the suffrage only to unmarried women being householders. But the drawing of this hard-and-fast line is at the outset contested by the champions of Woman's Rights; and it seems impossible that the distinction should be maintained. The lodger-franchise is evidently the vanishing point of the feudal connection between political privilege and the possession of houses or land. The suffrage will become personal in England, as it has elsewhere. If a property qualification remains, it will be one embracing all kinds of property: money settled on a married woman for her separate use, as well as the house or lodgings occupied by a widow or a spinster. In the counties already married women have qualifications in the form of land settled to their separate use; and the notion that a spinster in lodgings is specially entitled to the suffrage as the head of a household, is one of those pieces of metaphysics in which the politicians who affect to scorn anything metaphysical are apt themselves unwarily to indulge. If the present motion is carried, the
