The Sun.
London, England, 1868-08-27 00:00:00

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SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

The Times says all bad government, as Mr. Carlyle
remarks in his diagnosis of the French Revolution, ends in
insolvency. The temptation of a weak Minister is corrup-
tion, and corruption means increased expenditure, and
increased expenditure means repeated deficiencies. The
weakness of an incompetent Minister is extravagance, and
extravagance has the same ultimate result as corruption. The
madness of a reckless Minister is profusion, and profusion
is another form of the same disease. Whichever way we
regard the position of a Minister who, placed in a
minority, is resolved to maintain his position at all
hazards, we are forced to the conclusion that the country
must suffer for his ambition. It is almost a necessary
consequence that, when we find the estimates con-
tinuously increasing and a surplus converted year
after year into a deficiency, we should conclude
that the management of affairs is for a time entrusted to a
man who is careless of everything except maintaining his
supremacy as a Minister. Is it, or is it not, the fact
that since the accession of a Conservative Ministry to
power the process of reducing the national expenditure
has been not only arrested, but turned backwards? There
is only one answer to the question, and everyone is
so conscious of the truth that those who would have
it otherwise compare the present expenditure with
the worst years of the "Extravagant Parliament" in order
to find an excuse for it. It will be seen on examination
that the Liberal Administration bequeathed to their suc-
cessors an expenditure in process of reduction, and that
Mr. Disraeli has managed to change the order, and to con-
vert a yearly decrease into a yearly addition to the national
charge. We had, under the Liberal Ministry, a reduc•
tion of more than three millions in three years, and in four
years a total of taxation reduced or abolished of £13,693,000.
In three years the optional expenditure under the Conser-
vative rule has grown from 239,680,000 to £43,730,000,
and taxation is increased instead of reduced. Extravagance
has been winked at right and left.

The Daily News criticises the proceedings of the British 1
Association at Norwich in the section of Economic Science.
Miss Becker pleaded ably and eloquently for the equality
of the two sexes, but she practically asserted the supe-
riority of that " sex of man " to which she herself belongs.
When Miss Becker concluded her paper, a member
of the other " sex of man "—Mr. Joseph Payne—
naturally thought that as his turn had come he
might read his paper ; but the crowded audience
had been so excited by the vindication of the
feminine intellect that the sterner sex had not a chance.
The Section would not have even hurried extracts from
Mr. Payne's paper ; all that it would do was to discuss
Miss Becker. Into this discussion both sexes of man seem
to have entered warmly, but it ended in an entire rout of
the advocates of feminine inferiority. The practical con-
clusion at which the Economic Section arrived is perhaps
the best answer to the just complaints on which Miss
Becker's rather extravagant claims were founded. The
Council of the British Association are asked to appoint a
committee to consider how the scientific education of women
can be promoted. It is in a, wider, more liberal education that
the female sex will find the remedy for that expulsion from
the great field of the world's work of which Miss Becker
complains. Let the faculties of each sex be trained with
equal thoroughness, and their inherent distinction will
come out as clearly as their essential oneness. Perhaps if
the emotional nature of men and the reason of women
were more thoroughly cultivated in their education we
might hear less of " supposed differences in the minds of
the two sexes of man."

The Standard considers that in the department of
Economic Science and Statistics Miss Becker is clearly
out of place with her " supposed difference " between man
and woman. Nothing she was able to prove under these
restricted conditions of inquiry could possibly be of any
scientific use. The- lecturer's argument, if we understand
it rightly, is that there is no difference, moral or in-
tellectual, oetween man and woman—that the two
sexes are in ail but physical respects equal—and not only
equal, but similar—that the variations which exist are
the result of the arbitrary and partial behaviour of the
men in respect to theii'natural rivals. From the begin-
ning., it is certain that both men and women have acted
under the idet*of their
,dissimilarity; and are ,we to
believe now that this iuea, common to both sexes, was but
an arbitrary assumption not warranted by nature ? Even
if we could suppose that the theory of the sexual differ-
ence originated in the superior strength or selfishness of
the male sex alone—which is a monstrous assumption—we
should be forced to admit this among the other proofs of
a radical and inherent distinction.