ABSTRACT
There is a certain political danger in thus making an unrepresented class the chief agents in an election, for where there is no vote, there is apt to be no feeling of responsibility. Influence is indefinite in quantity as well as in quality. We ourselves believe that politics will become all the more honest and straightforward for women being accustomed to take their share, but what becomes of the objection that they have no business apart from their domestic. concerns~
MEMORIAL TO MR. STANSFELD.-A memorial, remarkable alike for its wording and for the signatures attached to it, has been sent from Italy to. Mr. Stansfeld, M.P., condoling with him upon the recent death of Mrs. Stansfeld. It is in the form of an exquisitely-wrought bronze wreath of oak and ivy leaves, with the inscription, "To Caroline Stansfeld from the Friends of Italy." As the daughter of Mr. ';V. H. Ashurst, the life-long
friend of Joseph Mazzini, and the wife of James Stansfeld, Mrs. Stansfeld was trebly entitled to the loving memory of Italian Liberals. The chief significance of the offering at the present moment lies, however, in the memorial which accompanies it. After recording the claim which Mr. Stansfeld has on the gratitude and sympathy of the Italians from his many years of friendshif, and devotion to Mazzine and the cause of young Ita y, it goes on to say :-
But if, as Italians, the debt of national gratitude binds us to you, as believers in the inviolable rights of the human :individual, we all, men and women, who are comrades in the same faith, admire and love in you the earnest and chosen champion of the great cause of the moral progress of humanity, and particularly of the redemption of woman from the slavery and abominations to which she is subjected by the brutal egotism of society, which in this respect is unworthy of the title of civilised. ·
This document is signed by 62 members of the Italian Parliament, among others by the ex-Ministers, Cairoli, and Nicotira, and by the secretaries of countless Italian democratic and working men's clubs, co-operative societies and unions in Genoa, Rome, Turin, Milan~ Cremona, Mantua, and other cities, representing many thousands. Arriving, as it does, on the eve of a general election which will bring so many social questionR, and notably those affecting public morality, before the nation, it is a cheering manifestation of public sympathy from a country which only lately achieving freedom and unity, has always been closely bound to England by the ties of sympathy.
