As it will have been realised, long before the advent of the next century, that the surest way to improved capacity is to be found in increased responsibility, women will not, a hundred years hence, be allowed or compelled to shirk their political obligations. We may see with half an eye that every year women are becoming more capable, and also more desirous of aiding the counsels of the public: and in some of our Colonies, as well as in some States of the American Union, they are already voting, and voting (as it turns out) with the most wonderful intelligence and usefulness. The influence of the female vote in, for example, New Zealand has been for some time perceptible in the legislation of that highly-enlightened colony: and I never heard anyone object to the results of this influence except persons whose conduct, or the conduct which they approved in their associates, was likely to be inconvenienced by them. It is no doubt true that women are a great deal more fond of demanding that the law should do work which it would be better to leave to natural developments of public character than could be wished: but then so are men, and it is an unquestionable thing that the misdeeds which men more readily condone than women are much more likely to be bad for public morality than those which women condone more freely than men. There is no particular reason for thinking at the present time (though there was ample reason for thinking a few decades ago) that women will be more prone to legislate unnecessarily, and therefore mischievously, than men: and we are in any case bound to pass through a good many years of parliament-worship before we awaken to the fact that the law cannot do everything, and that any reform which is accomplished by the spontaneous influence of public opinion is always a great deal more complete, a great deal more conducive to public self-respect, and a great deal better adjusted to the special requirements of every individual circumstance that it touches, than one which is laboriously and mechanically embodied in statutes which cannot but be imperfect, cannot possibly fail to act oppressively and unjustly in one place or another, and frequently prove to be unworkable from beginning to end. CHAPTER XII GENERAL CONCLUSIONS