"Observer" points the moral of the! tale thus:
At the risk of seeming to damage the case in the general mind, let us confess frankly what specially struck us in the weeks which elapsed before the second hearing. It was the fact that those peers who took any real interest in the issue were against the petition. The peers who said they were not against, showed by every recognise able sign their scant concern to see the petition granted.
One instance is charged in the retrospect with a significance acquired only by the typical. The peer's benignant air: No, he had no personal objection to seeing peeresses take their seats. Upon further pressure a faintly lessened benignity and the admission that he would be guided towards any final step by the opinion of legal experts. The lay peer had, it would seem, almost as blind a respect for law as has the average woman. Yet he had not honoured the experts on whose opinion he leant so heavily by reading their argument before the first Committee. Happily, it would seem, a second hearing was imminent, at which lay peers; were expressly hidden to assist. in order to hear legal Opinion at first hand and to vote on the result. The "favourable" peer did not attend.
Of the peers professedly neutral who did attend—one of two things, either their more or less secret prejudice against the measure was} given courage by the Lord Chancellor to venture into the open, or their favourable sentiments were ssu modestly held as to: be indistinguisiiable from disfavour.
Way nor 1n tHe Hovse or Lozps?
One must suppose the peers know that in this matter of admitting women to the Lords, there can be nothing remotely comparable to the opposition met and overcome before women could exercise the suffrage. Yet women not only vote for others, they are themselves voted for. Do the Lords think the women of their own order are more likely to damage the country's interests than the women already in the Commons?
An irony of chance -made the ford. Chancellor the instrument for clarifying a fact more important than the need of women in the Lords. He managed to set in a new light something but "dimly apprehended hitherto. It is that while enemies to woman's progress know what they want and are likely to be active in pursuit of their end, her friends, even her best friends among men, are to all intents and purposes passive.
My own contention is that we shoul show ourselves unfair if we blamed men for this. "All that the observant and candid woman has any real ground for asking or expecting is that the more fair-minded type of man should not, in a moment of instinctive atavism, actively oppose her progress.
We do not say this in any bitterness. We are sure that men will, be able to see the woman's point of vies and give it something of the same active sympathy and intelligent service which women have brought to man's pre-occupations. Tf men of this, temper and habit are as yet in the world, they are probably very young. They do not sit in the House of Lords. They are not found in Cabinets.
The public relations between men and women will be easier from the moment women recognise that mer simply cannot as yet feel any genuine sympathy with women's activities beyond the never-denied two. We need hardly say that of these the first is concerned with women's sex functions, and the second with her value as low-grade, low-paid worker. To recognise this without rancour, or even wounded feeling, will be 2 great saving of time and friction, In sum then, the second hearing showed the root trouble to be not that men will not fairly represent women. But that men cannot. The sooner women face that fact the better for both them and men, of whom the impossible has quite unfairly been expected.
The immediate way to "face it?" is for women to bring home to their representatives in the House of Commons the realisation that women voters expect the Sex Disqualification Act to be cleared of the stigma' of being a piece of undignified trickery. To that end women look to their representatives to see that I.":.y Rhondda's petition is granted without loss of time.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.