house is entitled to the franchise, provided his employer does not reside in the house; but by giving his employer a night's shelter he might lose his vote.

(3) Occupiers of £10 clear annual value and upwards, whether directly rated or not. These are users of offices, warehouses, shops,

&c., not being householders.

(4) Lodgers. Every person of full age who has occupied and resided in the same lodgings for twelve months, of the clear unfurnished value of £10 annually, is entitled to claim to be registered and to vote. He need not be rated, but he must renew his claim year by year. Moreover, if he changes his lodgings he loses his qualification till twelve months' continuous residence has again secured him a new one. Two lodgers, occupying lodgings in common on the same conditions, may each claim to be registered and to vote, if the clear unfurnished value of the apartments amounts to £10 a year for each of them.

(5) The old franchises, free men and freeholders, reserved by the Reform Act of 1832.

(6) University electors, who in 1900 numbered 41,503 in the three kingdoms. They return nine members.

SCHOOL BOARD FRANCHISE.

In London: paroWith regard to the

This includes men and women. In boroughs: the burgesses. In parishes outside boroughs: the ratepayers. chial electors, except in the City of London. School Board franchise, it must be remembered that each elector is entitled to as many votes as there are members to be elected, and may distribute these votes at pleasure. In the City of London women have not yet established their right to vote.

MUNICIPAL FRANCHISE.

All ratepayers, men or women, on the Burgess Roll. For the new London Borough Councils and the London County Council the electoral qualification is wider than that for any other Borough or County Council in England and Wales, being simply that of being a "parochial elector." Thus, qualified married women, male lodgers, and male holders of the service franchise may vote for the London County and Borough Councils, but for no other Borough or County Councils in England and Wales.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT (COUNTY COUNCIL) FRANCHISE. Men and single women who are owners or occupiers.

PAROCHIAL FRANCHISE.

Those entitled to vote for the election of Boards of Guardians, Urban District Councils, Rural District Councils, and Parish Councils are (1) Men and women, being inhabitant householders, whether rated directly or not; (2) and further, in the case of men, lodgers, caretakers, and service occupiers, as well as owners, resident, or nonresident. It must here be observed that though married women were expressly made competent electors by the Local Government (England and Wales) Act of 1894, the fact that in England and Wales, outside London, married women have not yet been admitted as County Council electors, and can therefore only vote as occupiers, reduces greatly the possible number of qualified married women. A woman, living with her husband, can seldom secure a qualification, unless she be the personally rated owner, or the occupier, personally paying rent and rates, of the house in which they jointly live. In Ireland, it should be further noted, women voters, married and unmarried alike, may become qualified electors on precisely the same terms as men, that is, on the occupancy, ownership, lodger, or service qualification; and that on any of these qualifications women, whether married or not, may vote, not only for Urban and Rural District Councile, Boards of Guardians, and Town Commissioners, but also for Town and County Councils. In Scotland the qualified married woman, as well as her unmarried sister, may vote for Borough and County Councils, and in London for the Borough Councils or the County Council. It is now only in England and Wales (outside London) of the three kingdoms, that married women are still held in the inferior position declared to be theirs by the decision in Regina v. Harrald. It is also noteworthy that some revising barristers appear to be taking the extra-legal and high-handed course of striking the married English woman's name off the register, unless, like the lodger, she renews year by year her claim for registration.

With all these, and many other, foolish and vexatious differences and divergences, it is little wonder that overseers and others concerned find the task of preparing the electoral lists in any of our large centres of population almost overwhelming; the more so as these lists have to be published on July 31, while the twelve months' qualifying period only ends on July 15. In the parish of Birmingham, for example, the overseers find it necessary to prepare no fewer than seven draft lists, comprising

(a) Men entitled to vote at all elections.

(b) Men qualified by service franchise to vote at parliamentary and parochial elections only.

(c) Burgesses, men and single women, entitled to vote at municipal and parochial elections only.

(d) Married women entitled to vote at parochial elections only, under Local Government (England and Wales) Act, 1894.

(e) Men entitled by ownership of freehold property of the value of 408., admitted by the Act of 1894 as parochial electors only.

(f) Men non-resident, occupiers within the parish, living beyond seven but within fifteen miles of the city boundary, qualified to be elected as aldermen or councillors, but not entitled to vote at any election.

(g) The old lodgers' list of re-claims sent in to July 25, entitled to be enrolled as parliamentary electors.

So long as the divergence between the Parliamentary voter and the various classes of local voter is maintained, enormous waste of labour is inevitable, and the consequent confusion must with equal certainty lead to frequent injustice. A partial remedy for this waste of labour, this confusion and injustice, might be found, as suggested in various quarters, in the assimilation of the Parliamentary and Local Government register, by the extension of the Parliamentary franchise to all women now entitled to the Municipal, Local Government, or Parochial vote.1 But this remedy, though it would no doubt to some extent simplify procedure, would be only a partial remedy, leaving untouched many of the causes of confusion and grievance. Moreover, so long as property, in whatever form, and not simple humanity, is the basis of electoral qualifications, so long will those qualifications represent and maintain a privileged injustice. It is humanity, with its claims and wants, its faculties and powers, that needs and demands full civic and representative rights. And humanity is not of one sex only, but includes the mothers as well as the fathers of the race. The only true and permanent remedy, whether applied at once or more gradually, lies in the sweeping away of all narrow or special qualifications, and in the establishment of adult suffrage, women on the same footing with men, for all voting purposes, any residential qualification (six months or even three months would then be sufficient) being simply for purposes of identification and convenience, and to prevent personation or plural voting. The franchise is the right of each, because it is necessary to the protection of each, and because the civic energy of each is essential to the true commonwealth.

Registration should be freed from the incubus of party political agents, and made fully a public duty and charge; so that it should become as easy for the ordinary man or woman to be registered and to vote as to address and post a letter. In the case of aliens, this nation ought to be, and probably will be, at least as wisely generous as it desired the people of the Transvaal Republic to be, as to conditions of naturalisation. If even to male criminals the Parliamentary franchise, or the power to acquire it, is restored with the completion of their punishment, there can be no excuse for the

1 These number, according to the latest Parliamentary Return, that of 1897, in England and Wales 729,758; in Scotland, 132,067. There has been, as yet, no similar return for Ireland, nor of the married women voters in any part of the United Kingdom.

life-long exclusion of the women of the nation. Only by the crass selfishness of officialdom on both sides of the House of Commons, and by the almost utter lack of sympathetic imagination on the part of the majority of the male electorate, has this exclusion lasted so long. The grievance of women is that, in their case, freedom has not

"Broadened down

From precedent to precedent,"

but that their rights and liberties have in various directions been narrowed, by the obiter dicta of legal authorities, by express judicial decisions, and by statutory enactment. The few things that have been won for women have been won at the cost of painful and protracted struggle, and meanwhile other things have been lost-and women have to be perpetually on their watch against aggressive and sinister legislation. When the present writer began to work for women's suffrage, the number of male electors was not one million. Now it has risen to nearly seven millions, and with each extension of the purely male electorate the difficulty of securing attention to and remedy for the wrongs affecting women has steadily increased, till at last it appears hopeless to look for any further or other remedial measures till this one vantage-ground of equal citizenship has been secured.

A Parliament of men, responsible to male electors only, cannot and will not find either the time or the needful intelligence to deal with the needs and wants of women. It may contemptuously toss to them, from time to time, some trivial concession; but almost uniformly in these later years, if it has given a little with one hand it has taken more away with the other.

It is a commonplace of political science that the wider the basis of representation, the greater the danger and injustice to the unrepresented. Now, this danger is not the less, but very much the greater, when sex is made the line of demarcation, and the interests, convictions, and emotions of the mother-half of the race remain without effect on political or national action. The sex-worship and sexglorification of the male-half of the race means the deification of mere and sheer brute force, unrelieved by any free play of the gentler human emotions. It is beyond question the fact that there is less feeling amongst the mass of our countrymen now than fifteen years ago, for any solid movement of social reform; and unless it can be made to serve some fleeting party advantage, neither of the official political parties will touch it. And the reason is plain. Enfranchised manhood has not lifted up with it unenfranchised womanhood, but has left womanhood to be politically trampled underfoot. But the tyrant is only the slave turned inside out, and the enslaver of women becomes himself enslaved, first to his own lower nature,

and then speedily to those who know how to play upon that nature. The only adequate remedy is to turn to the paths of justice, to enfranchise women equally with men, and to co-operate with them as equals, for all social and political issues. With this change of mental and moral attitude towards women will the higher human education of men begin, and lead them upwards and onwards to nobler and yet nobler perceptions and developments of social and international justice.

IGNOTA.