may be said as to the assertion that without politics marriage is wanting in interest and affection lacks a bond.
Finally, it is said that there are certain specific grievances under which women labour, and which call for immediate redress, but of which redress cannot be had unless women are empowered to extort it from their husbands and brothers at the polls. Of course if there is wrong, and wrong to half humanity, which cannot be righted in any other way, we must at once accept Female Suffrage, whatever perils it may entail.
In the United States the grievance of which most is heard is the tyrannical stringency of the marriage tie, which, it is alleged, gives a man property in a woman, and unduly interferes with the freedom and genuineness of affection. Some of the language used is more startling than this, and if reproduced might unfairly prejudice the case. But male legislatures in the United States have already carried the liberty of divorce so far, that the next step would be the total abolition of marriage and the destruction of the family. The women themselves have now, it is said, begun to draw back. They have probably become aware that liberty of divorce must be reciprocal, that marriage is pre-eminently a restraint placed on the passions of the man in the interest of the woman, that a woman loses her charms more easily than she loses her need of a protector, and that to the children divorce is moral and social ruin. Mr. Mill demands for the "slave" the privilege of changing her master; he forgets that he would at the same time give the master the privilege of changing his slave.
The question, of which more is heard here, as to the right of women to the control of their own property, was one the importance of which was not likely to be fully perceived while comparatively few women earned their own bread. However, now that it is perceived, the British legislature has at least gone so far in removing anomalies that it need not despair of seeing itself do complete justice. In the United States, male legislatures, so far from being unwilling, display almost an exaggerated propensity to sever the
