A hundred years ago
At the meeting of the Manchester Society for obtaining the Suffrage for Women, on Wednesday, Mr Courtney, MP for Liskeard, remarked that the progress of the cause was retarded by a kind of human inertia, a sluggishness of the male intellect and torpidity of the masculine conscience, which had been an obstacle to the attainment of many other great measures of justice in time past. It was almost a misfortune, he said, that there was no prospect of Miss Becker leading a band of work-women to break windows or throw down Park palings; if there were more prospect of it, the women's suffrage movement might have more immediate hopes of success, for the torpid male conscience would be stimulated by this physical result of injustice. Probably men's conscience is torpid on this subject, because women's conscience is still more so; and perhaps the reason why women's conscience is so torpid is that, knowing, as women do, that they do not, and can never, wield the physical strength which is, after all, the last appeal in all legal matters — for without force behind the law, the law is of no account — they prefer to confine their political influence entirely to that region of argument and moral suasion Spectator, 9 November 1878
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