THE MACHINERY OF ELECTIVE GOVERNMENT. 647 



efforts in which multitudes of them have perished, and they have 

 shared with their families all its substantial advantages. As they 

 have fought, so they have legislated, for their wives and children as 

 well as for themselves. For their wives and children as well as for 

 themselves they have reclaimed the earth, made it fruitful, and bridged 

 the sea. What Mr. Mill calls slavery has, in the main, been the guard- 

 ianship of affection, a guardianship with which the women could not 

 have dispensed, though the conception evidently never entered Mr. 

 Mill's mind. If the man has had authority over the woman, the woman 

 has had authority over her child. The indissolubility of marriage, 

 which Mr. Mill calls slavery, and which is his capital grievance, is at 

 least as much a restraint upon the roving passions of the man as upon 

 the affections of the woman ; in truth, the very fact that man has insti- 

 tuted monogamy and made marriage indissoluble is the most conclu- 

 sive answer to Mr. Mill's charge. So far from women not being able 

 to get justice in a court under the existing law, the difficulty is to get 

 justice against a woman, and both in America and in England malo 

 legislatures have been passing laws respecting the property relations 

 of married people, which in effect release the wife from all the obliga- 

 tions and liabilities of matrimony, leaving the husband as fast bound 

 as ever.,4 American ladies who demand that marriage shall not be a 

 union, but only " a copartnership," would soon flinch from the conse- 

 quences of their own principle. That domestic outrage exists in bar- 

 barous classes is too true ; and it is committed as often perhaps by 

 women against children as by men against women, though the com- 

 plaints of the children are not so often heard ; but fifty votes given to 

 the unhappy victims would not correct the brutality of a savage home. 

 The women who head this movement do not really want equality ; they 

 want and expect to retain, with political power and freedom from mari- 

 tal control, all the present privileges of their sex. They do not want 

 to be thrust to the wall by male strength in a struggle for existence, 

 to have the penal law extended to them in all its severity, or to be 

 compelled to do the rough and dangerous work of the world. But 

 they will find that they can not have both equality and privilege, or at 

 once renounce and retain the guardianship of affection. Chivalry may 

 linger, as sentiments do linger, for a season ; but it will soon fall into 

 the grave of the conditions on which it depends. Perhaps the sex gen- 

 erally will find that they have paid dear for the fancy of the few who 

 wish to enter into public life. 



"What would be the effect of public life on female character, and the 

 effect of female intervention on the character of public life, are ques- 

 tions upon which some light has been thrown by our actual experience 

 since the commencement of this agitation. About the most violent 

 and scurrilous production which has appeared in the American press 

 for many a day was a series of letters written by a female politician ; 

 and it is remarkable that her object was to defend the system of favor- 



