There are women who seem now as anxious to obscure the fact of the novelty as they were to bring it to pass. If I might believe a lady novelist with whom I discussed the matter not long ago, the thing to rejoice over is that Lady Astor was adopted and elected as an ordinary party candidate, not primarily as a woman, as a nominee of some women’s party or as champion of some women’s programme. On this view, as I understand it, the winning of full political rights for women, having removed the greatest and most unfair of all the differentiations between the two sexes, leaves them now blended into one both as electors and potential candidates, as if this were a possible, natural or desirable consummation. It is, of course, a quite intelligible point of view, when the mass of stupidity against which it is a protest is considered. Women have suffered so much from the fact of their sex—though they have been inclined to underestimate its privileges and its powers even in the unregenerate days—that they may be excused if the last thing that they wish is to insist on it in the field of politics. Nobody can blame Englishwomen for wishing to come into the arena, as far as possible, unprejudiced, and to be regarded just as citizens, and not, in any sense, as freaks. Obviously, too, it would be impolitic on their part, at the first moment of the innovation, before they have found themselves or gained experience in the new sphere of action, to lay any stress on any kind of antagonism which might exist between them and the sex which has hitherto been in exclusive possession of that sphere. They would rather slip in unobtrusively in their dark coats and skirts and white collars, as not too conspicuous political animals, evading reporters and writers of paragraphs, making no parade of their special feminine experience, but trusting to opportunity to use it; making, also, no special appeal that a man could not equally make, until the novelty has so worn off that their candidature and their election shall become too common to provoke comment.