ii.] EMANCIPATION— BLACK AND WHITE. 21 



they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever 

 the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of 

 social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility 

 for the result Avill henceforward lie between Nature and 

 him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the 

 Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. 

 And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the 

 real justification for the abolition policy. 



The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical 

 delusion ; emancipation may convert the slave from a 

 well fed animal into a pauperised man ; mankind may 

 even have to do without cotton shirts ; but all these evils 

 must be faced, if the moral law, that no human being 

 can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous 

 damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily 

 demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If 

 this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double 

 emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom 

 more than the freed-man. 



The like considerations apply to all the other questions 

 of emancipation which are at present stirring the world — 

 the multifarious demands that classes of mankind shall 

 be relieved from restrictions imposed by the artifice of 

 man, and not by the necessities of Nature. One of the 

 most important, if not the most important, of all these, is 

 that which daily threatens to become the " irrepressible ;J 

 woman question. What social and political rights have 

 women ? What ought they to be allowed, or not allowed 

 to do, be, and suffer ? And, as involved in, and under- 

 lying all these questions, how ought they to be educated? 



There are philogynists as fanatical as any "niisogu- 

 nists ;; who, reversing our antiquated notions, bid the 

 man look upon the woman as the higher type of 

 humanity ; who ask us to regard the female intellect as 

 the clearer and the quicker, if not the stronger; who 



