The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED "The Evening News," "The Morning News," and "The Echo." WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1878.

Auckland Star, Volume IX, Issue 2603, 21 August 1878, Page 2

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED "The Evening News," "The Morning News," and "The Echo."

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1878.

Fortbecatiso that lacksasslstanee. For the wrong that needs resistance. For the future In the distance. And the good that wo undo.

Parliamentary business is nnprecedenteSly dull. The Electoral Bill occupied t,h e CTrea tor part. r>F yestcidaj'D olttiog, but without eliciting anything very new or very interesting. The only little diversion afforded by the debate is the discussion on enfranchisement of women, cropping out under the ratepayers' qualification, which confers the privilege of voting upon women possessed of property. The franchise is already exercised by them at city elections, and|as the ratepayers' list becomes a portion of the electoral roll for the House of Representatives, under the new Act, special exception must be made if the colony is to be guarded against the awful calamity foreseen by Mr Curtis of a woman possibly opposing her husband for a seat in the Colonial Parliament. The consequences in Mr Curtis's case are too terrible to contemplate. He may, however, rest perfectly easy, for neither the experience of city elections nor the average progress of any movement which goes dead in the teeth of all conventional usage and prejudice, leads us to believe that the danger is a very near one, even if the Bill leaves the women who pay rates the same rights in respect of their properties as those enjoyed by the "lords of creation." A compact column of twaddle on the subject has on two occasions figured under the editorial heading of the "Herald." To argue as the writer does to-day, that women should be debarred from the franchise because they are intellectually so very much inferior to men, or because certain female gorgons of the Besant type bring ignominy on the sex, is sheer nonsense. Where would manhood suffrage be tried by similar conditions? The strength of the chain must be tested by its weakest link, aiid our contemporary's argument to be good for anything must be capable of balancing the mass of intelligent virtuous women against the besotted residue of the other sex who are considered 4o be wronged by exclusion from all voice in the framing of those laws by which they are governed, and the spending of the monies taken, trom their pockets. The fatal objections to the women's franchise do not rest on the capability or otherwise of women to exercise the franchise if their inclinations led them to take an interest in politics ; but the fact, on the average, is exactly the reverse. The mingling of women in politics shocks our conceptions of the sphere marked out for the gentler sex, both by their physical and mental constitution. These views are, perhaps, a little arbitrary, and framed to fit into the other and higher sphere mapped out for the opposite sex, but, on the whole, they adjust tolerably well. We agree with Mr John Stuart Mill, and all other great thinkers ou social questions, that in view of a large body of women who perform all the duties and responsibilities to the State that are borne by men—who work and suffer under bad Jaws — demanding the franchise, we should not be justified in refusing them. But that time is not yet.