We have only to consider the very different lives women lead, leaving out of account the debatable differences in nature, to see how impossible it is for a man to look on life with a woman’s eyes. To begin with, as long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of this “division of labour” (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman’s to feel. “Men must work and women must weep” is perhaps the most fatuous expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men’s part in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite; women’s part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and long care. It follows from the apportionment of men’s and women’s work and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about. We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who make money and take life. “Things are in the saddle,” says Emerson, “and ride mankind.” Those who defend the male franchise declare confidently that in England “the family is the unit,” and that the voter casts his vote after a balanced judgment of the interests of the family as a whole. This is, of course, entirely without foundation. The vote is _not_ given to the family when the head of the family happens to be a woman; the vote is _not_ refused to a man when he has no family; several votes are given to one man, although legally he cannot have several families. So that, even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband, we still have a very large number of votes which represent men only, and those men bachelors. The evils of this in such a country as England are patent; in such a country as South Africa they are greater still. There the bachelor vote is unstable and indifferent to the permanent interests of the people, for the adventurous bachelor comes for what he can find, to make money, not a home; to take his pleasure where he can find it, among the women of an alien race, and leave in his track the degradation of sexual ethics, the embitterment of racial hatred, the burden of a fatherless race of half-breeds. All these ills fall upon the voteless women of South Africa, and are felt in their rebound by the English women at home.