systems.  One class of thinkers, of whom Froude is the most conspicuous, holds that the “good of the people” means good laws and good administration, and that, if these are only provided, it makes no sort of difference whether they themselves make the laws, or whether some Caesar or Louis Napoleon provides them.  All the traditions of the early and later Federalists point this way.  But it has always seemed to me a theory of government essentially incompatible with American institutions.  If we could once get our people saturated with it, they would soon be at the mercy of some Louis Napoleon of their own.

When President Lincoln claimed, following Theodore Parker, that ours was not merely a government for the people, but of the people, and by the people as well, he recognized the other side of the matter,—­that it is not only important what laws we have, but who makes the laws; and that “the end of a good government is to insure the welfare of a people,” in this far wider sense.  That advantage which the French writer admits in democracy, that it develops force, energy, and self-respect, is as essentially a part of “the good of the governed” as is any perfection in the details of government.  And it is precisely these advantages which we expect that women, sooner or later, are to share.  For them, as for men, “the good of the governed” is not genuine unless it is that kind of good which belongs to the self-governed.

[Footnote 1:  Sparks’s Franklin, ii. 372.]

[Footnote 2:  De Tocqueville, vol. ii. pp. 74, 75.]

RULING AT SECONDHAND

In the last century the bitter satirist, Charles Churchill, wrote a verse which will do something to keep alive his name.  It is as follows:—­

  “Women ruled all; and ministers of state
  Were at the doors of women forced to wait,—­
  Women, who we oft as sovereigns graced the land,
  But never governed well at second-hand.”

He touches the very kernel of the matter, and all history is on his side.  The Salic Law excluded women from the throne of France,—­“the kingdom of France being too noble to be governed by a woman,” as it said.  Accordingly the history of France shows one long line of royal mistresses ruling in secret for mischief; while more liberal England points to the reigns of Elizabeth and Anne and Victoria, to show how usefully a woman may sit upon a throne.

It was one of the merits of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that she always pointed out this distinction.  “Any woman can have influence,” she said, “in some way.  She need only to be a good cook or a good scold, to secure that.  Woman should not merely have a share in the power of man,—­for of that omnipotent Nature will not suffer her to be defrauded,—­but it should be a chartered power, too fully recognized to be abused.”  We have got to meet, at any rate, this fact of feminine influence in the world.  Demosthenes said that the measures which a statesman had meditated for a year might be overturned in a day by a woman.  How infinitely more sensible then, to train the woman herself in statesmanship, and give her open responsibility as well as concealed power!