WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN ENGLAND.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 226, 17 June 1908, Page 6

WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN ENGLAND.

It would seem as though Saturday last in London witnessed the dawn of reason as regards the claims of the British woman to bo placed on an electoral equality with the British man. On that day, as the cable states, ten thousand women suffragists formed in procession, and marched from the London Embankment to the Albert Hall with the object of convincing the Eight Hon the Premier, Me. Asquith, that educated women demand the franchise, and that the exponents of the demand were not confined to any " shrieking sisterhood." The personnel of the procession was distinctly intellectual, and its progress was quiet and orderly, while amongst its members were many women of rank and distinction. The fact that Mrs. AV. Pember Reeves accompanied the demonstration will be gratifying to her New Zealand sisters. The. addresses delivered at the Albert Hall were temperate in character, and the dawn of reason, so far as the women themselves are concerned, was made manifest by the condemnation of the previous militant methods adopted by other suffragette sections, and the advice tendered to pursue only peaceful tactics. All this is a welcome advance upon the deplorable exhibitions of undignified violence that have characterised the public actions of certain women suffragists in the past, and that must, undoubtedly, have only ..assisted to rotard recognition of thqir iust claims, rather than to further them.-Saturday's demonstration will have served to dispel the unpleasant impressions resulting from theso regrettable incidents, and to create the new impression that there is in the women's movement for enfranchisement something moro than mere fractiousncss, hysteria, and a desire for notoriety. It will have made plain that behind the movement are both •social position and trained minds, and that the forces directing it, based as it is on a plea for justice, must be reckoned with sooner or later.

,But the dawn of reason in the main has apparently broken with more startling effeefc, and assuredly with greater advantage to the women's causo, upon a hitherto irreconcilable section- of tho British Tress. The cable to-day informs its that tho Morning Post oven concedes that, while the giving of votes to women would not cffccfc any great political changes, " it may be a good educational measure, and a symbol of a salutary change of thought." The Standard, more grudging, allows that tho country, unprepared to go tho whole way, might "admit a million and a' quarter of highly competent and desirable women " to tho franchise. Tho Daily Express publishes a similar opinion, although hitherto it has been utterly hostile to the idea of votes for women, and The Times so far condcscends from its previous attitude of dignified aloofness as to acknowledge the earnestness and tho genuine anxiety of a " certain number" of hard-working women— " Mtnw of thorn el cprinidwaWo dirtinotion "—to obtain the suffrage. Votes for

women in the Old Country may now be said to have entered upon a new phase, and sympathisers in this new country, of the same race but further advanced upon the freer lines of true democracy, may read hope for the cause at the heart of their British sisters in this new and unexpected development of Saturday last. It will probably be found in England, as it has been found in New Zealand, that the concession of the franchise to women creates no new political party or, excepting on one or two questions, any new political force. It merely multiplies both the numerator and denominator of public opinion by the same figure.