No one who reflects seriously on the growth of the demand for woman suffrage since G. J. Holyoake quixotically expressed it in his manifesto of 1857 can hesitate in forecasting the future. In half a century the movement has expanded from a small group of a score of women writers to a body that can force 420 Members of Parliament to promise their support, can fill Hyde Park with half a million demonstrators, and can hold thousands of meetings throughout the country in the course of the year. No agitation, with anything like the same resources, ever made such advance in the course of thirty or forty years. Possibly two other organisations show a more imposing record--the early Free Trade movement and the modern Tariff Reform movement. But both these had enormous financial resources, dealt with a material issue, and had the organisation of existing great political parties to draw upon. The spirit of the age has borne women on as it advanced, and the future is assured. It is hardly too much to say that only the prejudice of _one_ man prevents the granting of the demand to-day in England. It will be in entire harmony with its early history and its finer traditions if England is the first great power to grant woman franchise, as it promises to be. Meantime, instances are multiplying in which smaller communities admit their women to political life with a happy success. In 1881 the miniature State of the Isle of Man granted a restricted franchise to women in the elections for the House of Keys. In Canada the question has been agitated since 1883, when Sir J. A. Macdonald inserted a clause enfranchising women in the Electoral Bill which he submitted to the Dominion Parliament. But the large Roman Catholic population of French Canadians blocks the way for the present in the Dominion. In Australia and New Zealand the more independent and progressive spirit of the colonists needed little pressure to realise that men who resent the despotic dictation of other men have no title to dictate despotically to their women. New Zealand very early caught the echo of the struggle in England. In 1878 an Electoral Bill, enfranchising women ratepayers, was put through the House of Representatives by the Government, but failed--not exactly on the woman issue--to pass the Legislative Council. The women organised in 1886, and saw their Bill in 1891 carried by a majority of thirty-two to seven in the lower House, but lost by two votes in the Council. In 1893 it passed both Houses, and of the 109,000 enfranchised women no less than 90,000 voted at the next general election.