not till the working classes were on the eve of obtaining a just share of representation that the motive power for the redress of that injustice was forthcoming. The same thing can be said with regard to those laws which press unjustly on women. Hardly anyone defends them; it is not so much the sense of justice in parliament or in the country that is wanting, as the motive power which representation, and representation alone, in a self-governed country can give, to get a recognised wrong righted. Another illustration of the value of representation may be found in looking back at recent discussions on alterations in the land laws of England and Ireland. This legislation has been discussed, month in and month out, in the House of Commons and on every platform in the United Kingdom, as if the interests of two classes and two classes only had to be considered, those of the farmers and the landowners. The labourers have been apparently as much forgotten as if the land were ploughed and weeded and sown by fairies, and not by men and women, who stand at least as much in need of any good that law-making can do them, as the other classes who are directly interested in the soil.
A curious illustration of the absolute neglect so far as politics are concerned, of all who are not represented, or whom, it is expected, will be shortly represented, may be found in the accounts of the recent celebration of the Bright festival at Birmingham. The Liberals who assembled to do the honour to Mr. Bright which he so richly deserves, enumerated, in honest pride, the main achievements of Mr. Bright's career; but they did not point to any chapter in the statute book and say, 'Here he succeeded in changing a condition of the law that was oppressive to women.' And this was so, although Mr. Bright has, on more than one occasion—as, for example, on behalf of a bill enabling women to receive medical degrees—lifted his powerful voice in favour of justice being done to women. Matters which affect injuriously, or the reverse, unrepresented classes, lie outside what are called practical politics. The politicians' field of vision is entirely filled by those who are represented; the unrepresented are forgotten. So, again, when the Birmingham Liberals let their imagination range over what was to be expected and worked for in the future, no mention was made of anything being done for women. Their ideal seemed rather to be manhood as opposed to universal suffrage; that is, all men not being either paupers or felons to be admitted to political power, no matter how ignorant, how poor, how degraded, in virtue of their manhood; while all women are to be excluded in virtue of their womanhood. The Birmingham imagination sees also with the eye of faith the payment of members. Members can only be paid by the taxpayers, that is the men and women of England; but the anomaly in a self-governed country of taking money from women to pay representatives without giving women any representation does not seem to have occurred to the political seer.
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