There are two ways in which the possession of the vote will benefit women: first, by raising their status, and, second, by giving them power to influence Parliament directly through their representatives. The matter of status seems to me by far the more important of the two, but because it is intangible, people with no imagination cannot grasp it. Yet men from the days of ancient Greece and Rome to now have very passionately clung to the badge of citizenship. We find magistrates now in England adjusting their sentences so as to avoid adding the humiliation of disfranchisement to other penalties of the law; we find Parliament debating earnestly how relief may be given to poor men without involving them in pauperisation, which means the loss of the vote; we remember how Members of Parliament pleaded for the coloured man in South Africa that “the intolerable slur of disfranchisement” should not be cast upon him, and we note with burning indignation that these Members are quite placidly content that this intolerable slur should remain upon their own mothers and wives. It is only an idea. Yet ideas have moved the world, and this idea that women are not born to be the slaves of men has rankled for ages; now that it has found expression, it rankles no longer, it has become an inspiration to millions of lives, not only of women but of men too. As to the direct use of the vote in affecting legislation, it is quite ludicrous to find people denying it. Like any other tool, the vote is only of use if the owners use it, and that men have made bad or insufficient use of the vote only shows that men may do so; it does not show that men always will do so, nor does it show that women ever will. Now there is one idea that always seems to crop up in the minds of politicians when any women’s problem is presented to them: it is, to prohibit. As Miss Gore-Booth has remarked, politicians of the type of Mr. John Burns cry out periodically, “Go and see what the women are doing and tell them not to!” It is always done, ostensibly, in the interests of the mothers and their children, but women know that what the mothers want is the means and freedom to do their work, not prohibition. What is the matter with the poor is their poverty, says Mr. Shaw. What is the matter with the mothers is their poverty and the ignorance that comes out of poverty. Remove the poverty and the ignorance and you will have done vastly more to check the infant death-rate and the manufacture of unemployables than you will by prohibiting all the mothers in the land from earning (not from working! No one ever proposes really to relieve them from toil!) and putting them absolutely into the power of men.