Woman Suffrage in Parliament: A Test for Cabinet Autocracy

The woman suffrage movement in Great Britain has rendered a service for political science of which even its adherents are often unaware. It has brought to a most searching test the prevailing constitutional theory.In these days of psycho-analysis of the individual there should be also some psycho-analysis of political institutions. Political theory, like the pious formulas with which we drape the nudity of our real desires and aspirations, is often at bottom what might be called a highly intellectualized excuse. Political theory is an afterthought: a justification or explanation of the desires and aspirations of the dominant economic and social group. The “divine right of kings” is now a hollow pretension to us. But it was as much a reality to the aristocracy, whose power is explained and excused, as are our own instinctive personal excuses. The “natural rights of man” have proven hardly more substantial,—the great excuse in which the rising commercial classes have ever covered their designs against the aristocracy. And now, at last, in the theory that “labor creates all wealth,” we find the embryo excuse for a growing threat of the working class.