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 of which her ancestors never dreamed.  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 recognitions of a 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.

There is the plain fact:  woman must be either a subject or an equal; there is no middle 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:  tradition is set aside, and we have nothing but reason 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 can be really 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 such critics certainly show no disposition to try the experiment.

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 United States