The arguments against Woman Suffrage are the usual arguments of Toryism. The franchise is not a right, but a privilege, to be conferred by a disposing class upon such persons as it selects. Women are, from physical causes, periodically incapable of taking a rational interest in public affairs. To enfranchise women will {348} distract them from their proper duties of maternity and the management of the home. It will produce dissension between husband and wife. It will lead to the admission of women to the professions, to Parliament, and to public offices. To those who have followed the course of Liberalism, as described in these pages, the arguments will appear familiar. The first is the general Tory assumption, inconsistent with every Liberal proposal of every kind, that the individual has no rights, except such as the State, or rather the governing class, chooses to bestow upon him. The second, third, and fourth are the egoistic arguments, which express the mind of a person who sees another always in relation with himself. They assume that the other is completely defined in terms of that relationship, and has outside its limits no character. All the actions of the other are explained by abstract reasoning from that assumption. Women are thus supposed to be involved entirely in their sex, and while no man suggests that the demand of transport workers for higher wages or the violence incident to a transport strike is an expression of maleness, the demand of women for the franchise and the violence of militant Suffragists are assumed to be the actions of spinsters disappointed of maternity and of females impelled by perverted sexual instincts.[361] The argument from maternity is one of those which imply that the governed class must be confined, so far as artificial methods permit, to those occupations which it can only perform in association with the governors. Women's political fortunes must be regulated upon the assumption that they ought to become mothers. Women are not to be free to choose maternity out of all possible occupations, they must be driven to it by the want of opportunity to do anything else. It is not a question of what women think that they ought to do, but of what men think that they ought to do. The individual is not to have the right to plan out her life as she pleases. Maternity is her business, and men will so contrive the State as to {349} discourage her from engaging in any other. In the same way eighteenth-century fathers warned their daughters not to develop their minds, lest the revelation of intellectual power should discourage suitors. Literary education was withheld in the reign of George III for the same reason that political education is withheld to-day, because it involves the independent activity of the individual. The fourth argument is even more crudely selfish than the third. Stated in plain terms, it means that if women have votes they will tend to form political opinions of their own,