Les races se feminisent, said Buffon,—­“The world is growing more feminine.”  It is a compliment, whether the naturalist intended it or not.  Time has brought peace; peace, invention; and the poorest woman of to-day is born to an inheritance such as her ancestors never dreamed of.  Previous attempts to confer on women social and political equality,—­as when Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, made them magistrates, or when the Hungarian revolutionists made them voters, or when our own New Jersey tried the same experiment, in a guarded fashion, in early times, and then revoked the privilege, because (as in the ancient fable) the women voted the wrong way,—­these things were premature, and valuable only as concessions to a supposed principle.  But in view of the rapid changes now going on, he is a rash man who asserts the “Woman Question” to be anything but a mere question of time.  The fulcrum has been already given, in the alphabet, and we must simply watch and see whether the earth does not move.

In this present treatment of the subject, we have been more anxious to assert broad principles than to work them out into the details of their application.  We only point out the plain fact:  woman must be either a subject or an equal; there is no other permanent ground.  Every concession to a supposed principle only involves the necessity of the next concession for which that principle calls.  Once yield the alphabet, and we abandon the whole long theory of subjection and coverture; the past is set aside, and we have nothing but abstractions to fall back upon.  Reasoning abstractly, it must be admitted that the argument has been, thus far, entirely on the women’s side, inasmuch as no man has yet seriously tried to meet them with argument.  It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional positions of the sexes:  the women have had all the logic; and the most intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited themselves to satire and gossip.  What rational woman, we ask, can be convinced by the nonsense which is talked in ordinary society around her,—­as, that it is right to admit girls to common schools, and equally right to exclude them from colleges,—­that it is proper for a woman to sing in public, but indelicate for her to speak in public,—­that a post-office box is an unexceptionable place to drop a bit of paper into, but a ballot-box terribly dangerous?  No cause in the world can keep above water, sustained by such contradictions as these, too feeble and slight to be dignified by the name of fallacies.  Some persons profess to think it impossible to reason with a woman, and they certainly show no disposition to try the experiment.