_Women who do not want the vote need never exercise it_; women who think the vote bad for their sex will still be free as air, when the vote has been given, to organise their sex against _use_ of the deadly thing. But to continue after this war to debar from being citizens, if they so wish, the hundreds of thousands of women who have served as loyally as men, and suffered more; to hang up again in hopeless chancery a measure of common justice that has long commended itself to nearly all the best minds in the country, a measure that, but for political accidents, would have already been granted, would be an unspeakable piece of national folly and ingratitude. There is surely now a general will to give the vote. What our minds must be turned to is the need, at the conclusion of the war, to have ready some means by which that general desire may be carried into effect, and women welcomed into the body politic, before the old deadlock difficulties and heart-burnings can begin again. It is not my part to suggest to superior wisdom what those means should be; but perhaps one may express the personal conviction that a measure of universal suffrage, granting one vote to every man above a certain age (not necessarily so young as twenty-one), and one vote to every woman—possibly over such higher age as would equalize the voting power of the sexes, though I myself do not fear that inequality—that such a measure would not affect to any appreciable extent the balance between the great parties in the State, and would ensure that those parties in future sprang from the main cleavages of human nature rather than from the accidents of privilege. Is it too much to hope that, in heroic times, such a measure might be passed by consent? Too much to expect that after this struggle, where all stand shoulder to shoulder, we shall feel that a man, however poor, and a woman, however humble, has a stake in the country which has done so little for him or her, yet for which he or she is suffering perhaps more than the rest of us, and, extending the hand of fellowship, say: “It is time you stood shoulder to shoulder with us in peace as well as war.” The voteless man! The woman! How many of the first will have given their lives; how many of the second their hearts! Have heroism, death, sacrifice, gone by privilege of property or sex, in this war? Shall we really take the lives, the wounds, the sufferings of the many men debarred from citizenship by mere lack of property, the services and sacrifice of innumerable women, and just say: “Thank you, helots!” For in a real democracy what is he or she who has no vote, save a helot, at the absolute disposal of the enfranchised community? It is as the symbol of freedom that the vote is so precious! Granted! But if from the infancy of this country we had not been sticklers for symbols, should we now be the free people that we are—as peoples go?