Those far-sighted and indulgent men who supported “Votes for Women” should surely be enjoying to the full the result of their pliability and humour! In the “Coupon Election” they expected six million feminine votes—for Coalition, of course. If we conjugate Ministerial messages as one verb, they could all have been rendered thus: “I expect, you expect, he expects” women to do their duty. But one point seems rather overlooked, and that is, the precise idea women have of duty. When I say “women” I mean women in the grand majority—not a few hundreds or even a few thousand agitators. And I dare to suggest that these “women in the grand majority,” do not care about their “votes” in the least—and that all the roaring of a megaphone press will never make them care. Nature is, and always will be, too strong for them, and Nature has not endowed them, except in a few rare cases, with a taste for politics. But Nature has given them far greater qualities, and has organised them in a special way—a way most beautiful, wonderful, and nobly privileged; and the greatest social reformer that ever risked the oft-tried sorry business of “re-constructing” civilisation, can never alter the work for which Nature is alone responsible. I do not believe that Women, speaking in the plural of nationalities, ever wanted the vote at all—but that seeing (and hearing) the wild clamour of some of their sisters, who shrieked and smashed themselves into notoriety, they were attracted by the fun of it, the noise of it, the curious, rowdy, non-feminine spirit of it, and followed the whooping and the yells with the fascinated amusement of children running after the “One Man Band” who beats a drum with his elbows and clashes cymbals with his feet. Mr. Lloyd George is a wise thinker in his generation, but his sagacity will be at fault if it should be proved (Heaven forbid!) that after all—yes, after all the screaming and smashing of windows, and all the efforts made on their behalf—the women as a whole prove apathetic and indifferent to this wonderful privilege they have fought for and won!

There is a French story of a certain spoilt little lady whose husband adored her, from the glimmer of her topmost blonde curl to the point of her broidered shoe, and who expressed to him her ardent wish for a diamond chain she had seen in an expensive jeweller’s window. Her husband, though rich and generous, apparently paid no attention to her oft-repeated request, till one day he suddenly presented her with the coveted ornament as a “surprise packet” and token of his affection. But she pushed the gift aside and gave way to bitter tears. “Why, oh, why did you bring me such a thing?” she sobbed. “I shall never wear it! Oh, why didn’t you buy me that dear weeny-teeny dog I saw yesterday! The weeny pet! I would have loved it so! I would have talked to it about you!—it would have been such a companion! Oh, I did want that weeny darling!”

There is a moral in this story (despite the contempt it must evoke among future female M.P.s), and “the pint,” as Captain Cuttle or his friend Jack Bunsby remarked, “lies in the application on it.” Whether Mr. Lloyd George and the supporters of the Women’s Franchise will perceive it is problematical—but whether they do or do not, there is a curious nature-fact about Woman which is frequently missed or overlooked by Man. It is this: That when she is given what she wants, she doesn’t want it! That is to say—the gaining of her objective concludes her active interest in it; the thing is possessed, and promptly loses its value. With the swiftness and ease of a butterfly she deserts the blossom from which she has stripped the pollen!

“Equality of the sexes” is one of the advanced feminine war-cries, when every one with a grain of common sense knows there is and can be no such equality. Nature’s law forbids. Nature insists on contrasts; the small and the great, the weak and the strong, the light and the dark. And women know well enough that their “calling and election” are superior to those of men—they are the makers of the race and the ordainers of the future, but their strength is not on the hustings or in the polling-booth—it is in the silence and sweetness of “Home.” The home is the acorn from which springs the oak of a nation. Women’s own instincts teach them that their power is too sacred a thing for common discussion; and when, in their despite, such discussion is let loose in the press by vulgarly interested sexualists and sensualists, their contempt is not concealed. They feel, strongly enough too, when questioned in the right spirit, that it is not needful for them to mix with the undignified scrambling of political methods; and any “apathy” as to the use of the vote, is simply that they have, or think they have, something better to do. Yes, indeed! They really and truly think that their home affairs, their children, their daily duties, even their clothes, are more in their line than “Coalition”! They are for unity of purpose most assuredly—all of one mind as to the punishment of surely the most miserable man on earth, the ex-Kaiser—equally of one mind concerning the barring out of the Huns from further interference of their own folks’ businesses—but they think, and rightly too, that so far as putting the nation’s house in order goes, the men should be trusted to do it. There was something very funny in Mr. Lloyd George’s opening words to a women’s meeting at Queen’s Hall—“I feel very shy and solitary!” Did he? Surely this was a bit of “camouflage”? But putting all blandishment aside, it is just a toss-up as to whether women’s votes will be quite as influential as prophesied. One of the surprises of the Coupon Election was Mr. Lloyd George’s “sweep-aside” of a chivalrous male candidate in favour of Miss Pankhurst, who, so it is understood, threatened the direst things against him in past “militant” days! Generosity and magnanimity on the part of a Prime Minister to a Suffragette, a male to a female, could no farther go!—but one wonders if the modern “Glendower” realised the effect his action had on many thousands of non-Pankhurst women? For sheer humiliation it came second only to the surrender of the German Fleet! Whether it served as good a purpose was answered by the result. “Drive Nature out of the door, she comes flying back through the window,” and one of the most curious, purely natural traits in woman’s complex character, is that she loves to have her own way up to a certain point, but when that point is gained she has had enough, and turns to man with a “Here! You take it!” And no woman has yet been returned to Parliament, for which we may all, if we have any common sense, thank God, and hope for the best that she never will be!