evils than political evils. Many opponents of women’s suffrage are really anti-suffragists in a far wider sense than they will admit; the arguments which many of them use are arguments against the franchise altogether. But if the anti-suffragist happens to be a candidate for Parliament, he dare not speak his mind about the existing male electors, lest they should not return, to represent them, a man who expresses so frank a contempt for them; he does not, therefore, express it. But some of the women anti-suffragists do, and we may learn a good deal from them as to the hidden sentiments of the men like-minded with them. One of the fallacies into which they most frequently drop is the confusion between legislating and electing legislators. They become eloquent about the disaster that would follow if women voters decided matters of foreign policy and high finance, and some cheap fun is made at the notion of the charwoman negotiating a loan, and the society beauty delimiting a frontier. But the male voters do not perform these functions, and the women voters would not be called upon to do so. The strongest argument against the Referendum is that the great mass of the people cannot and never will be fit to judge of matters requiring specialisation, nor to conduct negotiations requiring secrecy and despatch. Popular election means that the people chooses its rulers, chooses those—whom it should then trust—who shall carry out in detail the policy whose broad lines the people approve. Free press, free speech, open debates are the safeguards and opportunities for criticism and revision, but not for legislation and administration, which are the functions of governments and not of electors. There is no system conceivable that will work if the people will not work it. Men, unfortunately, are to be found who expend their ingenuity in discovering how best they can make representative institutions unworkable, and these men are by no means on one side of the House only. A great deal of the preposterous machinery of Parliament has been set up to circumvent the wreckers, who are, in practice, whatever they may call themselves, anti-democratic. But no machinery can take the place of common sense. It is the belief of the progressives that women have at least as much common sense as men, and that they have proved themselves far better diplomatists, perhaps because they have never had the same temptations as men to rely upon physical force as an “argument.” The conclusion is, that to be without representation in a country professedly governed by representative institutions, is to be perilously near to a state of slavery. If women were given the vote, England would be a better place, not because women are better than men, but because conduct is not right or wrong independently of its effects, and the effects of slavery are bad both for slave and for owner. CHAPTER VII THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM (1) THE WAGE-EARNER