18 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [n, 



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 will hence 

 forward 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 pauperized 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 &quot; irrepressible &quot; 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 

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



There are philogynists as fanatical as any &quot; misogunists &quot; 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 desire us to look up to the feminine moral sense as the 

 purer and the nobler; and bid man abdicate his usurped 

 sovereignty over Nature in favour of the female line. On the 

 other hand, there are persons not to be outdone in all loyalty and 

 just respect for womankind, but by nature hard of head and 



