point them actually. Twice the Government has been changed by a plébiscite, and on the second occasion the budget was submitted to the constituencies as directly as ever it was to the House of Commons. There may be some repugnance, natural or traditional, to be overcome in admitting women to seats in Parliament; but there is also some repugnance to be overcome in throwing them into the turmoil of contested elections, in which, as soon as female suffrage is carried, some ladies will unquestionably claim their part.
There are members of Parliament who shrink from the step which they are now urged to take, but who fancy that they have no choice left them because the municipal franchise has already been conceded. The municipal franchise was no doubt intended to be the thin end of the wedge. Nevertheless there is a wide step between this and the national franchise; between allowing female influence to prevail in the disposition of school-rates, or other local rates, and allowing it to prevail in the supreme government of the country. To see that it is so, we have only to imagine the foreign policy of England determined by the women, while that of other countries is determined by the men; and this in the age of Bismarck.
The writer of this paper himself once signed a petition for female household suffrage got up by Mr. Mill. He has always been for enlarging the number of active citizens as much as possible, and widening the basis of government, in accordance with the maxim, which seems to him the sum of political philosophy, "That is the best form of government which doth most actuate and dispose all parts and members of the commonwealth to the common good." He had not, when he signed the petition, seen the public life of women in the United States. But he was led to reconsider what he had done, and prevented from going further, by finding that the movement was received with mistrust by some of the best and most sensible women of his acquaintance, who feared that their most valuable privileges, and the deepest sources of their happiness, were being jeopardized to gratify the political aspirations of a few of their sex. For the authority of Mr. Mill, in all cases where his judgment was unclouded, the writer felt and still feels great respect. But, since that time, Mr. Mill's autobiography has appeared, and has revealed the history of his extraordinary and almost portentous education, the singular circumstances of his marriage, his hallucination (for it surely can be called nothing less) as to the unparalleled genius of his wife, and peculiarities of character and temperament such as could not fail to prevent him from fully appreciating the power of influences which, whatever our philosophy may say, reign and will continue to reign supreme over questions of this kind. To him marriage was a union of two philosophers in the pursuit of truth; and, in his work on the position and destiny of women, not only does he scarcely think of children, but sex and its influences seem hardly to be present to his mind. Of the distinctive excellence
