The object of representative government is to make the recognition of the principle that the interests of all are identical, preventive rather than remedial. What I mean by this will be best illustrated by the very case with which we are dealing. The Contagious Diseases Acts are based on the fundamental assumption that the interests of women, as a class, can be neglected, while those of men can be cherished. It is an erroneous basis on which to make any law, for it is a contradiction of the law of God. Evil fruits must always follow for the whole nation which permits its rulers to act on such an assumption. In the case in point these evil fruits are easily detected, and the fatal operation of the bad principle is easily traced; hence those who already possess the franchise may be trusted to repeal these Acts. But though in this instance the path of return from error may be short, still it is a path of _return_. It is a retracing of our steps, the necessity of which has been brought about by abnormal conditions; and there exists in our representative government no guarantee against the repetition of such errors in the future. The nation has to be recalled from error to rectitude; it has to purge itself; to recover a great principle; and if God grant that it returns to that principle from the expectation rather than from the experience of the miseries of violating it, that result will be one which does not flow naturally from our present partial representative system, but which has been induced upon it from without. The aim of representative government is to make the recognition of the identity of the interests of all a continual and natural process; and until women have votes, that which stands between this nation and the evil consequences of violating this principle is only the precarious barrier of “agitation.” Until women possess the franchise the system of our government will be unstable and not self-corrective. And this is much more evident in the present day than in former times, and is daily becoming more evident. There are great social questions pressing for consideration and for settlement; and so long as one sex undertakes to consider these questions alone, we shall be hurried into errors similar to the Contagious Diseases Acts, and into legislation based upon the neglect of the interests of women—a neglect which in all instances will prove, as in this it most emphatically proves, fatal to those imagined interests on behalf of which these are neglected. Legislation can never in these days, and at the stage of civilisation which we have reached, be just and pure until women are represented. Do not let the reader here for a moment suppose that I am attributing to men any intentional injustice, or that I am supposing that they will be actuated in general by anything but benevolent intentions towards women. But the safety and stability of all that is done in the nation depends, not upon the