The Sun.
London, England, 1868-07-04 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP TEE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

No, exclaims the Saturday Review'; "it won't do "—to
use Lord Shaftesbury's own minatory and 'dictatorial lan-
guage in the House of Lords. We are not going to make
another Reformation of the Church of England, with the
Protestant earl for our Henry and Cranmer, Luther,
,Calvin, and Zwingli, all in one. Whatever else the Church
of the future is to be, we are not quite prepared to have
all the work of convocations and synods, Conferences of
Savoy and Hampton Court, undoue by a short Act excogi-
tated by a committee in the Adelphi-terrace and subsidised
by Mr. Colquhoun's fund. It is just a trifle overdoing it
that we are'to consent to be puritanisedby the Coryph2eus
of Exeter Hall and the Church, be it of three or thirteen
centuries, unsettled at the dictation of a single person. A
new Act of Uniformity has been presented to the House
of Lords, avowedly founded upon the reports of the
Ritual Commissioners before that commission has con-
cluded its labours, and it seems without consulting tl
commissioners, and without the sanction of the Govern.
ment which issued the commission. We make all alloy •
ances for the necessities of the committee which has been
collecting subscriptions to put down Ritualism. They
must have something to show for;the money they have got,
or got promised, and, looking at Lord Shaftesbury's bill
merely as an advertisement for the last Protestant Asso-
ciation, it may answer that purpose, but it is not likely to
gain any other. We are not quite ripe for a new Church,
or for facing a new schism at the fag end of the last
session of a dying and dishonoured Parliament. Even if
nobody else protests against this hot haste, the Ritual
Commissioners themselves may feel aggrieved that the
bread is taken out of their mouths by the very man who
thought his dignity and consistency would be lost by con-
descending to assist at their inquiries.

The London Review deals with the woman's rights
question in an admirably written article. Suppose, it
says, a law was proposed in Parliament that no man
should ever be out later than ten o'clock at night ; that
butcher's meat should never be more than sixpence a
pound (with a proviso excepting early lamb perhaps) ;
that clubs should be abolished ; that the price of baby
flannel should be fixed at two shillings maximum ; that
there should be a censorship of the press ; that no servant
should be allowed to wear a chignon when she went out
with her young man ; and that the clergy should be
appointed household inspectors in every parish. Suppose,
again, that there was a dissolution of Parliament before
the bill was carried. Suppose, again, that women had
votes. Does anybody doubt that the majority of the
ladies in the constituency of the member who had proposed
this measure would rush to the poll in their thousands, as
the stump has it, and vote for that member? Those who
think it most just that women should share political
power with men—those who have the strongest and most
distinctly wrought opinion that there is a woman's side to
,every subject, and that life can never be well regulated
until that side is represented in the administration of
affairs--those who would not even think it right to refuse
votes to women, if they were decisively demanded, might
well give them with a trembling hand. Women may say,
" You, the men, have kept us out of our right places
ED long,
_hindering our culture, and in various ways
degrading us, that even if we are not your equals in
intelligence and in equity of sentiment, you are to blame
for it. Give us the same opportunities as you have your-
selves, and we shall equal you, and be just as fit to exer•
cise political power." But if we had no other means what-
ever of settling in a rough way the question of the
inequality of the sexes in intellectual power, there is ono
at hand, as old as the hills, but quite decisive. It is
notorious that women have not the originating faculty.
Whately, as we most of us remember, used to say that tho
only case in which he ever knew of a woman's originating
anything was that of a lady in some Irish city, who intro-
duced a certain improvement in the making of soda-water.
There is not a trace of a tradition, so far as we know, that
a woman ever invented a domestic implement, or
domestic process, or started any great improvement int
dress. She has invented nothing in spinning, weaving, or
sewing. It was men who invented stocking-machinerT.
It was a man who invented the sewing-machine. Is id
known that any woman ever suggested an improvement in
printing, in writing, in painting, in music, in dancing, or
in science? For all the thousands of years the world has
existed, we have never had from a woman anything like
high music or high dramatic writing. We have never, so
far as we remember, had any attempt by a woman to
create a philosophy. We profoundly doubt whether it
was a woman who first thought of such a thing as