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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

I

I.

There is not sufficient experience of the results of female voting to justify us in going further at present than we have already gone.

The extension of the vote to women is, as yet, unapproved by almost the whole of the civilised world. This fact is an impliet condemnation of what we have done. Only in Wyoming, South Australia, and a few other out-lying places has the vote been granted. The prospect of our example being followed by the great nations, such as Britain, France, or Germany, has of late diminished rather than increased. When a revolutionary reform like that has only just been started in a few small communities at the very ends of the earth, we should have patience and wait till the little tree we have planted has grown to maturity and brought forth fruit by which we can judge it. A great reform of this kind ought to be acquiesced in and adopted by some of the great civilised nations, and tried for a generation or two, and its practical working thoroughly tested before we venture to advance further in the same direction. Only three years have elapsed since we in New Zealand, amid the surprise and laughter of nearly the whole outside world, gave to all adult women the Parliamentary vote, and now, with little or no experience of the working or effects of such legislation, and with no certainty, as yet, as to whether the female vote is to do us good or to do us evil, our foolish Ministers are rashly preparing to rush into the wild scheme of putting a few old wives or elderly spinsters into the Legislative Council.

We must admit that, so far as our experience here goes, it is somewhat, if not very much, against the female vote. The moribund Parliament, which women so largely helped to elect, has certainly not been a model Parliament. In ability or in moral worth, the members were not better than, or even equal to, their predecessors. There are many who declare that the House of Representatives about to be dissolved was the most ignorant, the most foolish, and page 3 the most mischievous, we have ever been cursed with. Our women, whose influence was to be all in favour of purity, intelligence, and moral worth, had their full share in returning it. Assuredly, female voters are no more blameable for this than male voters. Indeed, it was to be expected that women, new to the situation, and cajoled and circumvented by electioneering canvassers, would blunder at their first election and at many a subsequent one. Common sense would have expected nothing else. Education, special education, is as necessary in the business of politics as in other businesses. How absurd, then, is it to imagine that one election (that of 1893) would furnish the experience required to enable us to judge whether the experiment of extending the franchise to women would or would not to beneficial to the Colony. And how wildly rash in the Ministry, with no more experience than this, to be already bringing in a Bill to open one of the two doors of Parliament to female politicians who have worked hard for the party.