But we must remember that all our American institutions are based on consistency, or on nothing; all claim to be founded on the principles of natural right, and when they quit those, they are lost.  In all European monarchies, it is the theory, that the mass of the people are children, to be governed, not mature beings, to govern themselves.  This is clearly stated, and consistently applied.  In the free states of this Union, we have formally abandoned this theory for one half of the human race, while for the other half it still flourishes in full force.  The moment the claims of woman are broached, the democrat becomes a monarchist.  What Americans commonly criticize in English statesmen, namely, that they habitually evade all arguments based on natural right, and defend every legal wrong on the ground that it works well in practice, is the precise characteristic of our habitual view of woman.  The perplexity must be resolved somehow.  We seldom meet a legislator who pretends to deny that strict adherence to our own principles would place both sexes in precisely equal positions before law and constitution, as well as in school and society.  But each has his special quibble to apply, showing that in this case we must abandon all the general maxims to which we have pledged ourselves, and hold only by precedent.  Nay, he construes even precedent with the most ingenious rigor; since the exclusion of women from all direct contact with affairs can be made far more perfect in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where even sex is merged in rank, and the female patrician may have far more power than the male plebeian.  But, as matters now stand among us, there is no aristocracy but of sex:  all men are born patrician, all women are legally plebeian; all men are equal in having political power, and all women in having none.  This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in human progress, that it cannot last forever, without new discoveries in logic, or else a deliberate return to M. Marechal’s theory concerning the alphabet.

Meanwhile, as the newspapers say, we anxiously await further developments.  According to present appearances, the final adjustment lies mainly in the hands of women themselves.  Men can hardly be expected to concede either rights or privileges more rapidly than they are claimed, or to be truer to women than women are to each other.  True, the worst effect of a condition of inferiority is the weakness it leaves behind it; even when we say, “Hands off!” the sufferer does not rise.  In such a case, there is but one counsel worth giving.  More depends on determination than even on ability.  Will, not talent, governs the world.  From what pathway of eminence were women more traditionally excluded than from the art of sculpture, in spite of Non me Praxiteles fecit, sed Anna Damer?—­yet Harriet Hosmer, in eight years, has trod its full ascent.  Who believed that a poetess could ever be more than an Annot Lyle of the harp, to soothe with sweet melodies