struggle, and an assertion at the sword's point, of principles, just in themselves, but needing qualification to make them available as the foundations of a polity, it is full of defects, to remedy which, so as to make it the deliberate expression of public reason, clear of sectional interest and passion, is now the great aim of political thought and effort. Those to whose hands it is committed at this crisis are trustees for posterity of a heritage bought by ages of effort and torrents of blood; and they are bound to allow neither their own ambition nor that of any one else, if they can help it, to imperil the safety of their trust. That women would be likely to vote for one set of aspirants to political office rather than for the opposite set, would be a very bad reason for withholding from them the suffrage even for a day; but, that they would probably overturn the institutions on which the hopes of the world rest, is as good a reason as there can be for withholding any thing from anybody. When free institutions are firmly established in Europe, the question of female suffrage may perhaps be raised with less peril, so far as political interests are concerned; but, to take a female vote on their fate at present, would be as suicidal as it would have been to take a female vote on the issues between Charles I. and the Parliament in the middle of the Civil War.
So far as elective government has succeeded, women in general have fully reaped the benefit of the improvements, moral and material, which it has produced. They are mistaken if they imagine that they fared better under the form of government which, in France and elsewhere, if they bad the power, their sentiment would lead them to restore. They were not exempt from the misery and starvation brought into every home by the ambitious wars and the general misrule of the monarchies or even from the cruelty of their criminal laws. Down to the last days of the monarchy in France women as well as men were broken alive upon the wheel for theft.
It is needless to say that any discussion of the relative excellence, intellectual or moral, of the two moieties of humanity would be equally barren and irrelevant. The only question is as to the proper spheres of the man and woman; and assuredly, by unsexing women, we should do no homage to their sex.
It is alleged that female influence would mitigate the violence of party politics. But what ground have we, in reason or experience, for believing that women, if introduced into the political arena, would be less violent than men? Hitherto they have been free from political vices, because they have generally taken no part in politics, just as home has been an asylum from political rancor, because political division has not been introduced between man and wife. But the chances are, that, being more excitable, and having, with more warmth and generosity of temperament, less power of self-control, women would, when once engaged in party struggles, be not less but more violent than men. All our experience, in fact, points this way. In
