Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) MY TWO COUNTRIES MY TWO COUNTRIES BY LADY ASTOR [Illustration] GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1923 COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. _First Edition_ AMERICA I[A] “_I can conceive of nothing worse than a man-governed world--except a woman-governed world._” I know that this welcome has nothing to do with me. Ever since I first entered the Mother of Parliaments I realised that I had ceased to be a person and had become a symbol. The safe thing about being a symbol is this--you realise that you of yourself can do nothing, but what you symbolise gives you courage and strength, and should give you wisdom. I certainly have been given courage and strength. I won’t say too much about wisdom. My entrance into the House of Commons was not, as some thought, in the nature of a revolution. It was simply evolution. It is interesting how it came about. My husband was the one who started me off on this downward career--from home to the House. If I have helped the cause of women, he is the one to thank--not me. He is a strange and remarkable man. First, it was strange to urge his wife to take up public life, especially as he is a most domesticated creature; but the truth is, he is a born social reformer. He has avoided the pitfalls which so many well-to-do men fall into. He doesn’t think that you can right wrongs with philanthropy. He realises that you must go to the bottom of the causes of wrongs and not simply gild over the top. For eleven years I had helped him with his work at Plymouth. Mine was the personal side. I found out the wrongs and he tried to right them. It was a wonderful and happy combination, and I often wish that it was still going on. However, I am not here to tell you of his work, but it is interesting in so far as it shows you how it came about that I stood for Parliament at all. Unless he had been the kind of man that he was, I don’t believe that the first woman Member of the oldest Parliament in the world would have come from Plymouth--and that would have been a pity.