a new order of things. Its existence having been so far a struggle, and an assertion at the sword's point, of principles, just in themselves, but needing qualification to make them available as the foundations of a polity, it is full of defects, to remedy which, so as to make it the deliberate expression of public reason, clear of sectional interest and passion, is now the great aim of political thought and effort. Those to whose hands it is committed at this crisis are trustees for posterity of a heritage bought by ages of effort and torrents of blood; and they are bound to allow neither their own ambition nor that of any one else, if they can help it, to imperil the safety of their trust. That women would be likely to vote for one set of aspirants to political office rather than for the opposite set, would be a very bad reason for withholding from them the suffrage even for a day; but that they would probably overturn the institutions on which the hopes of the world rest, is as good a reason as there can be for withholding anything from anybody. When free institutions are firmly established in Europe, the question of Female Suffrage may, perhaps, be raised with less peril, so far as political interests are concerned; but to take a female vote on their fate at present would be as suicidal as it would have been to take a female vote on the issues between Charles the First and the Parliament in the middle of the Civil War.
So far as elective government has succeeded, women in general have fully reaped the benefit of the improvements, moral and material, which it has produced. They are mistaken if they imagine that they fared better under the form of government which, in France and elsewhere, if they had the power, their sentiment would lead them to restore. They were not exempt from the misery and starvation brought into every home by the ambitious wars and the general misrule of the monarchies or even from the cruelty of their criminal laws. Down to the last days of the monarchy in France, women as well as men were broken alive upon the wheel for theft.
It is needless to say that any discussion of the relative
