For the happy wife and mother is never passionately concerned about the suffrage.  It is always the woman who is galled either by physiological hardships, or by the fact that she has not the same amount of money as man, or by the fact that man does not desire her as a co-partner in work, and withholds the homage which she thinks he ought to pay to her intellect.

For this class of grievances the present education of woman is responsible.  The girl who is growing up to woman’s estate is never taught where she stands relatively to man.  She is not taught anything about woman’s physical disabilities.  She is not told—­she is left to discover it for herself when too late—­that child and husband are to woman physiological requirements.  She is not taught the defects and limitations of the feminine mind.  One might almost think there were no such defects and limitations; and that woman was not always overestimating her intellectual power.  And the ordinary girl is not made to realise woman’s intrinsically inferior money-earning capacity.  She is not made to realise that the woman who cannot work with her hands is generally hard put to earn enough to keep herself alive in the incomplete condition of a spinster.

As a result of such education, when, influenced by the feminist movement, woman comes to institute a comparison between herself and man, she brings into that comparison all those qualities in which she is substantially his equal, and leaves out of account all those in which she is his inferior.

The failure to recognise that man is the master, and why he is the master, lies at the root of the suffrage movement.  By disregarding man’s superior physical force, the power of compulsion upon which all government is based is disregarded.  By leaving out of account those powers of the mind in which man is the superior, woman falls into the error of thinking that she can really compete with him, and that she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste.  Finally, by putting out of sight man’s superior money-earning capacity, the power of the purse is ignored.

Uninstructed woman commits also another fundamental error in her comparison.  Instead of comparing together the average man and the average woman, she sets herself to establish that there is no defect in woman which cannot be discovered also in man; and that there is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which cannot be discovered also in woman.  Which having been established to her satisfaction, she is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing whatever to choose between the sexes.  And from this there is only a step to the position that human beings ought to be assigned, without distinction of sex, to each and every function which would come within the range of their individual capacities, instead of being assigned as they are at present:  men to one function, and women to another.

Here again women ought to have been safeguarded by education.  She ought to have been taught that even when an individual woman comes up to the average of man this does not abrogate the disqualification which attaches to a difference of sex.  Nor yet—­as every one who recognises that we live in a world which conducts itself by generalisations will see—­does it abrogate the disqualification of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.