522 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pure industrialism, it would injure a society in which state-regulation 

 has the wider range characterizing a more or less militant type. Sev- 

 eral influences would conduce to retrogression. The greater respect 

 for authority and weaker sentiment of individual freedom character- 

 izino- the feminine nature would tend toward the maintenance and 

 multiplication of restraints. Ability to appreciate special and imme- 

 diate results, joined with inability to appreciate general and remote 

 results, characterizing the majority of men, and still more character- 

 izing women, would, if women had power, entail increase of coercive 

 measures for achieving present good, at the cost of future evil caused 

 by excess of control. But there is a more direct reason for antici- 

 pating mischief from the exercise of political power by women, while 

 the industrial form of political regulation is incomplete. We have 

 seen that the welfare of a society requires that tlie ethics of the fam- 

 ily and the ethics of the state shall be kept distinct. Under the one 

 the greatest benefits must be given where the merits are the smallest ; 

 vmder the other the benefits must be proportioned to the merits: for 

 the infant, unqualified generosity ; for the adult citizen, absolute jus- 

 tice. The ethics of the family have for their correlatives the parental 

 instincts and sentiments, which, in the female, are qualified in a smaller 

 degree by other feelings than in the male. Already these emotions 

 proper to parenthood, as they exist in men, lead them to carry the 

 ethics of the family into the policy of the state ; and the mischief 

 resulting would be increased were these emotions, as existing in women, 

 directly to influence that policy. Tlie progress toward justice in so- 

 cial arrangements would be retarded, and demerit would be fostered 

 at the expense of merit still more than now. 



But, in proportion as the conceptions of pure equity become clearer; 

 as fast as the regime of voluntary cooperation develops to the full the 

 sentiment of personal freedom, with a correlative regard for the like 

 freedom of others ; as fast as there is approached a state under which 

 no restrictions upon individual liberty will be tolerated, save those 

 which the equal liberties of fellow-citizens entail ; as fast as indus- 

 trialism evolves its appropriate political agency, which, while commis- 

 sioned to maintain equitable relations among citizens, is shorn of all 

 those powers of further regulation proper to the militant type ; so fast 

 may the extension of political power to women go on without evil. 

 The moral evolution which leads to concession of it will be the same 

 moral evolution which renders it harmless and probably beneficial. 



No very specific conclusions are to be drawn respecting future 

 changes in the status of children. Parental and filial relations, less 

 regulated in detail by law and custom than all others, have more 

 readily changed under the influence of changed sentiments and ideas, 

 and, while becoming generally liberalized, have become so far varied 

 that it is diflicult to characterize them. 



