been speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he is
heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify the
continued exclusion of women from the franchise. Accordingly a large
majority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at the
general election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage.
But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave that
pledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out.
There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionally
dishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final
decision is apparently genuine. They are aware that certain differences
exist between men and women, though they do not know what those
differences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question of
the franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in
their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future,
probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on
the other.

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in our
explicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by the
growing urgency of the problem of race. The fight for democracy in
Europe and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
was carried on by men who were thinking only of the European races. But,
during the extension of democracy after 1870, almost all the Great
Powers were engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvements
in the means of communication were bringing all the races of the world
into close contact. The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote
has (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined to
nations of European origin. But there is nothing in the form or history
of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to
suggest any alternative for the vote as a basis of government. Nor can