The truth is that in this age cedant arma togae: it is the civilian who rules on the throne or behind it, and who makes the fighting-men his mere agents.  Yonder policeman at the corner looks big and formidable:  he protects the women and overawes the boys.  But away in some corner of the City Hill there is some quiet man, out of uniform, perhaps a consumptive or a dyspeptic or a cripple, who can overawe the burliest policeman by his authority as city marshal or as mayor.  So an army is but a larger police; and its official head is that plain man at the White House, who makes or unmakes, not merely brevet-brigadiers, but major-generals in command,—­who can by the stroke of the pen convert the most powerful man of the army into the most powerless.  Take away the occupant of the position, and put in a woman, and will she become impotent because her name is Elizabeth or Maria Theresa?  It is brains that more and more govern the world; and whether those brains be on the throne, or at the ballot-box, they will soon make the owner’s sex a subordinate affair.  If woman is also strong in the affections, so much the better.  “Win the hearts of your subjects,” said Lord Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, “and you will have their hands and purses.”

War is the last appeal, and happily in these days the rarest appeal, of statesmanship.  In the multifarious other duties that make up statesmanship we cannot spare the brains, the self-devotion, and the enthusiasm of woman.  One of the most important treaties of modern history, the peace of Cambray, in 1529, was negotiated, after previous attempts had failed, by two women,—­Margaret, aunt of Charles V., and Louisa, mother of Francis I. Voltaire said that Christina of Sweden was the only sovereign of her time who maintained the dignity of the throne against Mazarin and Richelieu.  Frederick the Great said that the Seven Years’ War was waged against three women,—­Elizabeth of Russia, Maria Theresa, and Mme. Pompadour.  There is nothing impotent in the statesmanship of women when they are admitted to exercise it:  they are only powerless for good when they are obliged to obtain by wheedling and flattery a sway that should be recognized, responsible, and limited.

MANNERS REPEAL LAWS

There is in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” a correspondence which is well worth reading by both advocates and opponents of woman suffrage.  Boswell, who was of an old Scotch family, had a difference of opinion with his father about an entailed estate which had descended to them.  Boswell wished the title so adjusted as to cut off all possibility of female heirship.  His father, on the other hand, wished to recognize such a contingency.  Boswell wrote to Johnson in 1776 for advice, urging a series of objections, physiological and moral, to the inheritance of a family estate by a woman; though, as he magnanimously admits, “they should be treated with great affection and tenderness, and always participate of the prosperity of the family.”