WHAT THE BICYCLE DID.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 2132, 25 April 1914, Page 11

WHAT THE BICYCLE DID.

ONE OF THE LATEST EVENING' WRAPS, IN STAMPED VELVET, WITH PLAIN VELVET REVERS, ' COLLAR AND CUI'TS.

A most interesting and crowded meeting in connection with "Votes for Women" took 'place at the Kingsway Hall at the close of the week (March 16) , at which Sir Harry Johnston, the celebrated explorer, . made the chief speech-of the evening, writes "Alien, in tho "Otago Witness." After travelling over tho ground of the suffrage question, ho concluded as tho women of New Zealand will agree: "I do not wish, to, dwell: too much on the gloomy

sido of this unequal - struggle. Tho ] movement for tho enfranchisement of women—which, in my opinion, began .with . that God-blessed invention _ the safety-bicycle, especially the bicycle built for two—has brought far more happiness and sunshine in its train than sorrow and strife. In quarrying for radium we have not yet segregated tho radium, but we. have discovered gold, silver, copper, tin, and magnetic iion. A delightful comradeship on equal terms' has Eprung up between men and women. So far from this paganda leading to a sex war, it is ■bringing us nearer to a sex fusion—ft pooling of our common interests as 'human beings. ; This comradeship of men and women in ordering tho affairs 'of tho commune or the country, though it may have done away with silly, oldfashioned gallantry, seems to have induced. greater decency in spfeech and iconduct among men —tho conversation of 'those associated_ women has the ..wholesome, antiseptic frankness of the surgeon speaking to the nurse; it has replaced the insipid twaddle of tho drawing-room by the. straight talk of the counting-house or the debating society. . . . Wo waut to aim at an equal partnership between tho two sexes, nothing more and nothing less, and those men who are busying themselves more and more now in the matter of securing the Parliamentary vote for women, l and, with it and by it, a complete equality of treatment for the two sez-s, aro calling this new world into existI Mice to rodress tho want of balance in the old."