attached to her husband, "exactly as much may be said of domestic slavery.... It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible are called forth in human beings toward those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using their power." Even children are only links in the chain of bondage. By the affections of women "are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man." The Jesuit is an object of sympathy because he is the enemy of the domestic tyrant, and it is assumed that the husband can have no motive but the love of undivided tyranny for objecting to being superseded by an intriguing interloper in his wife's affections. As though a wife would regard with complacency, say a female spiritualist, installed beside her hearth! It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Mill's views, in writing such passages, were colored by the incidents of his life. But it is by circulating his book and propagating his notions that the petitions in favor of female suffrage have been obtained.
The anomalies in the property law affecting married women, to which remedial legislation has recently been directed, are like whatever is obsolete in the relations between the sexes generally, not deliberate iniquities, but survivals. They are relics of feudalism, or of still more primitive institutions incorporated by feudalism; and, while the system to which they belonged existed, they were indispensable parts of it, and must have been so regarded by both sexes alike. Any one who is tolerably well informed ought to be ashamed to represent them as the contrivances of male injustice. It is not on one sex only that the relics of feudalism have borne hard.
The exclusion of women from professions is cited as another proof of constant and immemorial injustice. But what woman asked or wished to be admitted to a profession fifty or even five-and-twenty years ago? What woman till quite recently would have been ready to renounce marriage and maternity, in order that she might devote herself to law, medicine, or commercial pursuits? The fact is, the demand is connected with an abnormal and possibly transient state of things. The expensiveness of living, in a country where the fashion is set by millionaires, combined with the overcrowded condition of the very callings to which women are demanding admission, has put extraordinary difficulties in the way of marriage. Many women are thus left without an object in life, and they naturally try to open for themselves some new career. The utmost sympathy is due to them, and every facility ought in justice to be afforded them; though unhappily the addition of fresh competitors for subsistence, to a crowd in which literally famine has already been at work, will be as far as possible from removing the real root of the evil; to say nothing of the risk which a woman must run in committing herself irrevocably to a precarious calling and
