installed beside her hearth! It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Mill's views, in writing such passages, were coloured by the incidents of his life. But it is by circulating his book and propagating his notions that the petitions in favour of Female Suffrage have been obtained.
The anomalies in the property law affecting married women, to which remedial legislation has recently been directed, are like whatever is obsolete in relations between the sexes generally—not deliberate iniquities, but survivals. They are relics of feudalism, or of still more primitive institutions incorporated by feudalism; and while the system to which they belonged existed, they were indispensable parts of it, and must have been so regarded by both sexes alike. Any one who is tolerably well informed ought to be ashamed to represent them as the contrivances of male injustice. It is not on one sex only that the relics of feudalism have borne hard.
The exclusion of women from professions is cited as another proof of constant and immemorial injustice. But what woman asked or wished to be admitted to a profession fifty or even five and twenty years ago? What woman, till quite recently, would have been ready to renounce marriage and maternity in order that she might devote herself to law, medicine, or commercial pursuits? The fact is, the demand is connected with an abnormal and possibly transient state of things. The expensiveness of living, in a country where the fashion is set by millionaires, combined with the overcrowded condition of the very callings to which women are demanding admission, has put extraordinary difficulties in the way of marriage. Many women are thus left without an object in life, and they naturally try to open for themselves some new career. The utmost sympathy is due to them, and every facility ought in justice to be afforded them; though unhappily the addition of fresh competitors for subsistence to a crowd in which literally famine has already been at work, will be as far as possible from removing the real root of the evil; to say nothing of the risk which a woman must run in committing herself irrevocably to a precarious calling and closing against herself the gate of domestic life. But the
