woman in the political dealings of Queen Victoria, especially with Lords Melbourne and Beaconsfield? If these great women could not avoid the influence, it is hardly to be expected that women politicians and the men with whom they deal politically will avoid it more successfully. The inevitable introduction, or accentuation in a sphere where it had hitherto been less marked, of this new element was the one consideration on which a fair-minded man might have seriously pondered before making up his mind on the question of votes for women. No professions or good intentions on women’s part could conjure it away, and it was to be admitted that it would make for evil as well as for good. The mutual influence of the sexes may produce the highest devotion and the loftiest endeavour. Men and women will do for one another, both individually and in the mass, greater and finer things than they will do for their own sex alone: they can appeal to each other’s highest feelings. On the other hand, they can appeal to the lowest feelings, and the flow of the current, either by attraction or repulsion, can easily work in such a way as to cause distraction rather than concentration, irrelevancy rather than logical conclusion. It might well have seemed, on dispassionate reflection, that there was already irrelevancy enough in the political life of England. Appeals to prejudice or mere personalities were common enough without increasing the strength and range of their appeal. With every recognition of the logic of the women’s claim, there remained the fear that the woman’s tendency to take an intensely personal view of questions, her ready affection by emotional side-issues, the sway which personal antipathies and repulsions exercise, almost unconsciously, over her mind, and the quite notorious unscrupulousness with which she will use every possible feminine appeal to gain over a man against his better judgment, might be as unfortunate as the influence of her higher qualities would be valuable. The march of events and of political thought triumphantly overbore objections of this kind: they could not possibly stem the tide of great historic necessity. But this tide has not swept facts away: what was true in such objections remains true still, nor will retorts on the nature of corresponding masculine failings destroy them. Men, let it be admitted, are as frail in their way as women, and then let it be recognised that the influence against which they are most frail has burst into a region where they were comparatively exempt from it. There is no disrespect, I feel sure, in reminding Englishwomen, who are not at all averse from criticising other members of their sex, of these things. Those of them who recognise the dangers will have the opportunity of guarding against them by educating the ignorant. It will be for them, the political leaders of the women, to see that women’s influence is used to clarify, not to obscure, judgment, to deprecate