Morning journal and courier., 1886-09-09

niment petit would be the dominant factor in l politics. Such meddling legislation as the Sunday closing act in England and the Maine liquor laws in the United States would be the joy and aim of the mass of female vot- CTS. Women cannot understand that you can make no nation virtuous by act of Parliament; they would construct their acts of Parliament on purpose to make people virtuous whether they chose or not, and would mot that this would be form of tyranny as bad as any other.
 do not think the moral and mental quail ties of the average woman so inferior to those of the average man as is conventionally sup posed. The nan is not an intellectual nor a noble being; neither is the average woman. But there are certain solid qualities in the male creature which sre lacking from the female; such qualities as toleration and calm ness in judgment which are of infinite value, and in which the female character is almost invariably deficient; a lack in her which makes the prophecy of Dumas, that she will one day fill judicial and forensic duties, a most alarming prospect, as alarming as the predic- tion of Goldwin Smith that the negro popu- lation will eventually outnunber and tinguish the Aryan in the United States.
 There exists a difference in mind and char acter, for which women would never make any allowance when forcing on the world in general their political or social nostrums. AS we again and again see the woman ex- pecting from her son purity of manners of maiden, and making no account, because she ignores them entirely, of the imperious necessities of sex, so we should see her in matters of national or universal import simi larly disregarding or ignoring all facts of which she chose to take no note.
 Dumas observes that happy women will not care for suffrage because they are happy; he might have added that brilliant women will fhaxr ho11a of iv,Ar1 men to any side and to any extent they choose without it. Who, then, would care to exer- else ita All the unhappy women, all the fret full declassees, all the thousands or tens of thousands of spinsters who know as much or as little of human nature as they do of polit- ical economy. What will such as these bring into political lifea They can bring nothing except their own crotchets, their own weakness, their own hysterical agita- tions.
 Happy women are fond of men, but un- happy women hate them.
 The enormous pretensions to the monopoly of mans life whichwomen put forward in marriage are born of desire to tyrannize. The rage and amazement displayed by the women when man, whether her lover or her husband, is inconstant to her, comes from that tenacity over the man as a property which wholly blinds her to her own faults or lack of charm and power to keep him. A very clever woman never planes man for inconsistency to her; she may perhaps blame herself. Women as rule attach far too gaeat value to themselves; the woman inn agines herself necessary to the man because the man is necessary to her. Hence that eter- nal antagonism of the woman against the man which is one of the saddest things in human nature.
 In marriage the influence of the woman, whatever popular prejudices plead to the contrary, is constantly belittling and injuri- ous to the intelligence of the man.
 Not infrequentlY what is called with pious praise good woman, blameless in her own conduct and devoted to what she conceivss ts be her duties, has been more fatal to the orig inality, the integrity, and the intellectual brilliancy of man than the worst courtesan could have been.
 Very few women are capable of being the sympathetic mistress of great man, or the ennobling mother of child of genius.
 An arab who weeps when female child is born to him Is perhaps more correct in his measurement of the sex than the American who is prepared to make her the spoiled and wayward sovereign of his household. By mental inferiority I do not mean that the average woman might not, if educated to it, learn as much mathematics or as much metaphysics as the ordinary man. do not deny that Girton may produce senior wrang- lers or physiologists in time to come; it may do so. But the female mind has 8 radical
 
 charm; it is intensely subjective, it is only reluctantly forced to be impersonal, and it has the strongest possible tendency to ty- ranny.
 As scientists look forward to the time when every man will be bald from boyhood, thus having outgrown the last likeness to the beasts that perish, so enthusiasts for female suffrage look forward to a time when woman will have shed all her fair follies and reetifed III her amusing inconsis- tencies.
 Man has, I repeat, been very fair in his dealings with women, as far as legislation goes; he could easily have kept her for all time to the hareem and 1t has been proof of fairness, if not of his wisdom, that he has not done so. I have little doubt but that, before long, he will cede to her clamor, and let her seat herself beside him or opposite to him on the benches of his representative houses. When he does, he will, think, regret the hareem.
 I confess that I, for one, dread the day which shall see this further development of that crude and restless character of the nine- teenth century, which, with sublime self contentment and self-conceit, it has presum- ed to call Progress.