POLITICAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF WOMEN. 91 



thousand, and yours are the best armed/' Instead of a hattle, 

 there is a count of the combatants and a settlement in favor of 

 the numerically stronger. So a count of the fighting forces took 

 the place of a trial at arms, and the appeal to the majority of 

 men capable of becoming soldiers, and so alple to enforce their 

 will against the weaker minority, took the place of insurrection 

 as a method of political agitation. This view may not justify, 

 but it does account for, the exclusion from enumeration in the 

 class that decide political issues of the whole class of non-com- 

 batants. 



IV. The next great immunity which, in recognition of the 

 offices they exercise in the social system, and having its origin in 

 the same sentiment, women enjoy, is exemption from all kinds of 

 labor dangerous to life or exposing to hardship and privation. 

 Thousands of men among all civilized and some barbarous people 

 pass their lives from childhood to old age on the ocean as seamen. 

 • Their terra firma is the sloping deck of ships staggering through 

 the restless billows, the sport of fickle winds. They fare hard ; 

 their sleep is liable to rude interruption ; their toil, though not 

 constant, is liable to crises of exertion and danger. At the word 

 of command, enforced by brutal blows, they climb the slippery 

 ropes or icy spars at the risk of being shaken into the boiling 

 waves or, with fractured skulls, upon the reeling deck. This em- 

 ployment, from which women are excused, is only slightly less 

 fatal to life than that of the soldier, and the ingenuity of man 

 has devised no means considerably to lessen its annual roll of pre- 

 mature and appalling deaths. 



In the same category belong those occupations that take thou- 

 sands of workingmen into our northern forests, where they pass 

 three months of each year contending with frosts and snows, 

 sleeping upon hemlock boughs in smoky camps, and maintaining 

 an exceptional vigor expended in continuous labor by the abun- 

 dance of their rude fare. A shorter interval of more dangerous 

 labor succeeds this long exile in the forest, when the timber the 

 winter's industry has gathered is driven to the place of manufac- 

 ture and sale through wide lakes and over dangerous rapids. 



All the hard, repulsive, life-wearing work under ground in 

 coal, mineral, and metallic mines is generally assigned to men, 

 and they alone are exposed to those perils which beset engineers, 

 train-men, the handlers of explosives, and the tenders of ma- 

 chinery. 



It is certainly apparent that man, as the stronger sex, has not 

 made an ungenerous use of his strength in his assignments. 

 Having, in the right of his strength, the opportunity to deter- 

 mine the customs of society, he has taken upon himself, and ex- 

 empted his mate from, all those vocations that expose to prema- 



