VOTES FOR WOMEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 77, 31 March 1928, Page 8

VOTES FOR WOMEN.

The second reading of the Equal Franchise Bill, providing for what is popularly known as the I lapper Vote, hps been carried by a huge majority, and the measure is now practically certain to become law. The fact that only ten members out of a total of nearly 500 ventured to oppose the Bill shows, that the tide of events has turned irresistibly in its favour. !Mr. Baldwin, with an immense majority of his own followers and the whole Labour and Liberal contingents behind him, has declared that the Bill aims only at justice for women, and he refuses to admit that there is any ground for apprehension and anxiety in this vast extension of the franchise. Sir W. Joynson Hicka, in supporting the Bill, claimed that it is the necessary and logical outcome of the long series of Reform Bills since 1832, and he reminded the House that the gloomy prophecies which have always greeted eaeh fresh proposal for an extension of voting power on democratic lines have never yet been justified. At the end of George lll.'s reign there were only 440,000 voters in a population of twenty-two millions. The Reform Bill of 1832, which brought the country close to revolution, added fewer than 500,000. After the extension of 1867-68 the electorate was only two and a-half millions. Just before the war, in the last year of which the franchise "was greatly extended, the total wa# eight millions. If this Bill passes it will be twenty-six millions. Yet it is legitimate to point out that there never has been in| our political history so sudden and sweeping a readjustment of the balance of political power as this. To-day the male electors of Britain are in a majority of 3,000,000. When this Bill is passed th£y will be in a minority of 2,000,000, and however sound and logical the principle of the Bill may be, it is clearly impossible to predict or even conjecture its ultimo political effects.