havior, as during courtship. Constantly acknowledged twoness is indispensable to coincident oneness. In urging the political question, woman brings not mere avoirdupois weight, but living mind, to be admitted to citizenship. Her enfranchisement will prove the advent of reason and conscience to politics, obedience to "law whose throne is in the bosom of God, and whose voice is the harmony of the world." The prejudice against her fulfilling any function which makes her an independent, thoughtful, self-sustaining being is excited by narrow and despotic selfishness. We have created antagonism by establishing a privileged male class.
Family feuds.Painful results of this effort to make two lives serve one erring will, may be seen in family quarrels, which are nature's protest against enforced coincidence. Instead of agreement, mutual deference and concord in the home, "the heart's country," we too often find hatred, conflict and chronic anarchy. These are thought to be the fault of one or both of the parties concerned, as indeed they often are, though they generally spring from deeper causes—from coerced allegiance, ill-defined rights and duties. A Frenchman, though married, was accustomed to spend his evenings with a certain maiden lady; when his wife died, being asked why he did not marry the other, he replied that "if he did, he should not have anywhere to spend his evenings." It was remarked of another "he loved her so that one never would have thought she was his wife." An American woman brought into court, charged with pouring a pail of boiling water over a man, defended herself on the ground that she supposed it was her husband. An English wife paints her once loved lord, the courtly Bulwer, with "the head of a goat and the body of a grasshopper." Such eccentric instances are not entirely untruthful satire of the alienation which "wedded bliss" promotes when parties thereto are not free and equal factors. Approaching her before marriage with requests, afterward with commands, the lover, kneeling to an adored maid, will swear himself incapable of one of the thousand huts he may not hesitate to inflict on her as wife. As we do not find two hills without a hollow between them, so two intelligent beings, however loving, cannot abide together in healthful peace unless the separate, intact liberty of each is perpetually held inviolate. To commit one's self beyond recall to finite being, for any purpose whatever, makes unitary concord impossible and undesirable. A clear-headed business man says: "The chief cause of matrimonial inharmony is in the fatal error that parties recognized in law as capable of making a contract are not also thought capable of dissolving that contract." Forced consent annihilates existing love and makes its revival impossible. Those who think liberty so dangerous an element in love would do well to, at least, imagine how the simplest affairs could proceed on the grab game their frenzied conservatism adheres to. The methods of chance, fraud and deceit, which now determine the most sacred and eventful experiences of life, would be deemed evidence of insanity if proposed as the basis of business partnership. Science, which takes off its hat to aspiring insects, traverses infinite space, makes pilgrimages to the Arctic, the Amazon, the Alps and Adirondacks, studies breed in birds and herds, will ere long find it worth while to wait on women and men, and explore those dark places of the world—the kitchen, the bed-chamber and the nursery. Matrimonial bureaus and newspaper personals, used for purposes shameful enough; the great relief a careful father feels when a daughter is well
