brothel and the street; but not for her the emoluments of office, the golden prizes of business, or even a chance for an honest existence.
Self-government.The drift of our social relations is from status to contract, from accepting life at second-hand to an original acquaintance with its sources. While the slave becomes a citizen, and the hireling an owner, it is a poor commentary on man's gallantry and good sense that she, whom he loves beyond all other beings incarnate, should be the last instead of the first object of this ameliorating law. The most significant spectacle of modern civilization is the trial of institutions in the court of reason, the liberation of intellect, from much which has been "bowed down to as the intention of nature and the ordinance of God." Personality, the origin and mainspring of reform, the point where renewing life enters decaying fact, is the germ of that wilderness of pronoun I's we call society, which was made for man, not man for it. When viewed from elevated points, the prominent outlooks of history, the human race, in all ages and nations, will be seen to have steadily obeyed an onward beat of things. Growth brings diversity, thinking isms, which are to be welcomed rather than deplored, when exposed to criticism, to that prophet and law-giver of the world, free inquiry. No sensible tree rests its reputation on last year's foliage, but greets each spring with new life. That power, behind which the party of rest so often encamp—custom—favors growth, not sterility; for the tendency to advance, the law of progress, is the perennial and overruling force of human society. Nothing is so revolutionary and convulsive, as the strain to keep things where they are, in opposition to expanding tendencies. The established government is a criticism, an amendment of a former, itself again to be revised or displaced by a larger thought. The form is less than what informs it, the temple than the deity enshrined. A violet or a cedar of Lebanon, serf, sovereign, individual being everywhere has its declaration of independence, its claim to life and scope. The all-animating impulse now bids woman "mix with action lest she wither by despair." More willing to incur responsibilities than to fulfill them, too much of man's self-government has been an effort to govern everybody except himself. The case of Sickles and Key, of Cole and Hiscox, of McFarland and Richardson, all such outbreaking evidence of the latent tragedy of domestic life, is justified on the theory of woman's incompetency to decide for herself. The husband as hereditary ruler, allowing no interference with his divine right to "protect," is self-constituted judge, jury and executioner to inflict death on any one disposed to befriend her. Marriage is not a free civil contract, cognizant of mutually grave moral responsibilities as it should be, but a consolidated union, of which man as proposer and disposer, is supreme law. Boys are "bound out" till twenty-one, girls are bound in for life. The negro was just whose cuffy he happened to be; the wife is just whose birdie or drudge she happens to be. As masters quoted law and gospel over their slaves, so husbands emphasize their claim to wedded chattels. There is not one word in all these objections to woman's suffrage but would justify slavery or imperialism. We must therefore grant her claim, or turn our portaits of Washington and Adams to the wall, level Bunker Hill monument into the harbor, haul down the democratic republican flag and go back under king and pope. In punishing her we admit she has a moral sense to be convinced or coerced; but while conceding her freedom for bad, and not for good, we yet hold that men, eligible
