FEMALE SUFFRAGE. 437 



male. Xo woman can imagine that iier sex can execute, or in case of 

 rebellion reassert, the law ; for that they must look entirely to the 

 men. The men would be conscious of this, and, if any law were made 

 exclusively in the interest of the women, and in contradiction to the 

 male sense of justice, they would refuse to carry it into effect. In the 

 United States there have been intimations, on the part of the women, 

 of a desire to make a very lavish use of capital punishment, untram- 

 meled by the technical rules of evidence, for offenses or supposed of- 

 fenses against the sex. The men would, of course, refuse execution ; 

 law would be set at defiance, and government would be overturned. 

 But the bad effects of the public consciousness that executive force — 

 the rude but indispensable basis of law — had been partly removed, 

 and that the law was being made by those who had not the power to 

 carry it into effect, would not be limited to manifest instances of the 

 influence of sex in legislation. In cases where, as in Jamaica, an 

 elective government has rested on two races, equal, legally speaking, 

 in political power, but of which one was evidently inferior in real 

 force to the other, reverence for law has been weak, and the result 

 has been disastrous. There can be little doubt that, as soon as the 

 Federal bayonets are removed, there will be another case of the same 

 kind in the Southern States ; laws made by negro majorities will be 

 set at defiance by the stronger race. To personal despotism or 

 class domination civilization can put an end, but it cannot eliminate 

 force. 



It is very likely that in England the women, to reform drunken 

 husbands, would vote for extreme prohibitory measures agaiust 

 liquor ; but the difficulty of carrying such legislation into effect, great 

 as it is already, could hardly fail to be much increased by the feeling 

 that it was the act of the women, and the consequence would prob- 

 ably be contempt, and perhaps open defiance, of the law. Female 

 legislation with regard to education, in the interest of clerical ascend- 

 ency, would be apt to be attended by the same effects. 



Elective government, with the liberty of opinion and the power of 

 progress which are its concomitants, has been brought into existence 

 by the most terrible throes of humanity. When perfected and firmly 

 established, it will, as we hope, and have good grounds for believing, 

 give to reason and justice an ascendency which they have never had 

 before in human affairs, and increase the happiness of all by making 

 private interest subordinate to the public good. But its condition, if 

 we look at the world as a whole, is still exceedingly precarious. All 

 the powers of class interest, of sybaritism, of superstition, are arrayed 

 against it, and have vast forces at their command, including the great 

 standing armies of Europe, while they find accomplices in the lassi- 

 tude, the alarm, the discouragement caused by the revolutionary 

 storms which, unhappily, are almost inevitable attendants uj>on the 

 birth of a new order of things. Its existence having been so far a 



