just—even to women—without fear. If women are not excluded from the next Reform Bill, may we not anticipate the growth of new bonds of sympathy and union between men and women? Their lives will be less separated than they have hitherto been. It is one of the most disastrous things that can happen to a nation to have a great wall of separation, as regards opinion and feeling, grow up between men and women. This state of things is to be seen very conspicuously in some Catholic countries—such, for instance, as Belgium—where the women influenced by Catholicism, and the men influenced by a revolt against Catholicism, belong, as it were, to two entirely different strata of civilisation; and hence each sex loses a great part of what it might otherwise gain from sympathy and companionship with the other. Every circumstance which widens the education of women—their political, as well as their literary education—renders impossible the building up of that wall of separation. It may be said there is no danger of such a state of things in England; but if there is no danger of it, is it not because we have already gone so far along the road of giving equal justice to women? We have gone so far and with such good results there could hardly be a better reason for going further.
It is possible there may be some who have rather a dread of this demand for giving women votes, because it is so essentially modern. Few of the leading statesmen of the present day ever say anything in its favour, and fewer still of the political leaders of the past have supported it. It must, however, be remembered that when a politician becomes a political leader, his time is so much engrossed in carrying on the work of practical politics—that is, in one form or another, in obeying the behests of those who have political power—that he very seldom has time to give to other people's wants. We must not expect the initiative in this matter to come from Governments. We must ask those who have votes to help us, and let Governments know that they wish for justice for women as well as for themselves. All good things must have a beginning, and if this demand on the part of women for representation is good in itself, it is none the worse for being, as compared, say, with tyranny and selfishness, new. Christianity was a new thing once; even now—as we were reminded the other day—it is held to be true only by a minority of mankind; the belief in witchcraft was once universal and was shared even by the wisest and most cultivated of men. If there is a soul of goodness in things evil, may we not observingly distil out of the mistakes of the past something that will strengthen our hopes for the future? No one is wise enough or great enough to be able to set a limit upon the progress of mankind towards knowledge and well-doing. In the chapter of Grote's History of Greece on the attitude of the Greek mind towards the Greek myths, the author shows, how in the early dawn of Greek history, the belief was universal
