FALSE DREAD OF DANGER.

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§ 5. There may be much danger in placing an invalid under the regimen proper to people in robust health. For a dyspeptic, chicken-broth may be in all respects better suited than more substantial fare. And whoso is suffering under an attack of influenza, will do wisely to avoid a blustering north-wester, or even a gentle breeze from the south. But he would be thought more than silly who inferred from such facts that solid food and fresh air are bad things. To ascribe any evil results to these, rather than to the unhealthy condition of the patients, would imply extremely crude ideas of causation.

Similarly crude, however, are the ideas of those who infer that unlimited liberty of speech is improper, because productive in certain states of society of disastrous results. It is to the abnormal condition of the body politic that all evils arising from an unrestrained expression of opinion must be attributed, and not to the unrestrained expression itself. Under a sound social regime and its accompanying contentment, nothing is to be feared from the most uncontrolled utterance of thought and feeling. On the other hand it may happen that where disease exists, exposure of the sore places of the state to the cold breath of criticism, will superinduce alarming symptoms. what then? A Louis Philippe, a General Cavaignac, or a Louis Napoleon, may find excuse in a corrupted and disorganized state of things for espionage, censorships, and the suppression of public meetings. But what then? If a nation cannot be governed on principles of pure equity, so much the worse for the nation. Those principles remain true notwithstanding. As elsewhere pointed out (p. 50), there must necessarily exist incongruity between the perfect law and the imperfect man. And if evils are entailed upon a people by immediate and entire recognition of the law of equal freedom, in the matter of

speech as well as in that of action, such evils are merely significant of the incomplete adaptation of that people to the social state, and not of any defect in the law.

CHAPTER XV.

FURTHER RIGHTS.

DID circumstances demand it, sundry other chapters of the same nature as the preceding ones, could be added. Were this France, it might be needful formally to deduce from the law of equal freedom, the right to move from place to place without leave of a government official. In addressing the Chinese, some proof that a man is at liberty to cut his clothes after whatever fashion may best suit him, would perhaps be called for. And, similarly, there might be found in different times and places, many other directions in which the law of equal freedom required asserting. But it is unnecessary now to repeat over again the reasoning so many times used. These that we call rights, are nothing but artificial divisions of the general claim to exercise the faculties-applications of that general claim to particular cases; and each of them is proved in the same way, by showing that the particular exercise of faculties referred to, is possible without preventing the like exercise of faculties by other persons. The reader has already seen the most important rights thus established; and the establishment of such minor ones as have not been touched upon, may safely be left with himself.

THE RIGHTS OF THE SEXES EQUAL.

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CHAPTER XVI.

THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.

§ 1. Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense. The law of equal freedom manifestly applies to the whole race-female as well as male. The same à priori reasoning which estab lishes that law for men (Chaps. III. and IV.), may be used with equal cogency on behalf of women. The Moral Sense, by virtue of which the masculine mind responds to that law, exists in the feminine mind as well. Hence the several rights deducible from that law must appertain equally to both sexes.

This might have been thought a self-evident truth, needing only to be stated to meet with universal acceptation. There are many, however, who either tacitly, or in so many words, express their dissent from it. For what reasons they do so, does not appear. They admit the axiom, that human happiness is the Divine will; from which axiom, what we call rights are primarily derived. And why the differences of bodily organization, and those trifling mental variations which distinguish female from male, should exclude one-half of the race from the benefits of this ordination, remains to be shown. The onus of proof lies on those who affirm that such is the fact; and it would be perfectly in order to assume that the law of equal freedom comprehends both sexes, until the contrary has been demonstrated. But without taking advantage of this, suppose we go at once into the con. troversy.

Three positions only are open to us. It may be said

that women have no rights at all—that their rights are not so great as those of men—or that they are equal to those of men.

Whoever maintains the first of these dogmas, that women have no rights at all, must show that the Creator intended women to be wholly at the mercy of men—their happiness, their liberties, their lives, at men's disposal; or, in other words, that they were meant to be treated as creatures of an inferior order. Few will have hardihood to assert this.

From the second proposition, that the rights of women are not so great as those of men, there immediately arise such queries as-If they are not so great, by how much are they less? What is the exact ratio between the legitimate claims of the two sexes? How shall we tell which rights are common to both, and where those of the male exceed those of the female? Who can show us a scale that will serve for the apportionment? Or, putting the question practically, it is required to determine by some logical method, whether the Turk is justified in plunging an offending Circassian into the Bosphorus? whether the rights of women were violated by that Athenian law, which allowed a citizen under certain circumstances to sell his daughter or sister? whether our own statute, which permits a man to beat his wife in moderation, and to imprison her in any room in his house, is morally defensible? whether it is equitable that a married woman should be incapable of holding property? whether a husband may justly take possession of his wife's earnings against her will, as our law allows him to do?-and so forth. These, and a multitude of similar problems, present themselves for solution. Some principle rooted in the nature of things has to be found, by which they may be scientifically decided-decided, not on grounds of expediency, but in some definite, philosophical way.

THEIR MENTAL CAPABILITIES.

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Does any one holding the doctrine that women's rights are not so great as men's, think he can find such a principle?

If not, there remains no alternative but to take up the third position-that the rights of women are equal with those of men.

2. Whoso urges the mental inferiority of women in bar of their claim to equal rights with men, may be met in various ways.

In the first place, the alleged fact may be disputed. A defender of her sex might name many whose achievements in government, in science, in literature, and in art, have obtained no small share of renown. Powerful and sagacious queens the world has seen in plenty, from Zenobia, down to the empresses Catherine and Maria Theresa. In the exact sciences, Mrs. Somerville, Miss Herschel, and Miss Zornlin, have gained applause; in political economy, Miss Martineau; in general philosophy, Madame de Staël; in politics, Madame Roland. Poetry has its Tighes, its Hemanses, its Landons, its Brownings; the drama its Joanna Baillie; and fiction its Austens, Bremers, Gores, Dudevants, &c., without end. In sculpture, fame has been acquired by a princess; a picture like "The Momentous Question" is tolerable proof of female capacity for painting; and on the stage, it is certain that women are on a level with men, if they do not even bear away the palm. Joining to such facts the important consideration, that women have always been, and are still, placed at a disadvantage in every department of learning, thought, or skill-seeing that they are not admissible to the academies and universities in which men get their training; that the kind of life they have to look forward to, does not present so great a range of ambitions; that they are rarely exposed to that most powerful of all stimuli-necessity;