Decidedly, we need cavalry.  In older countries, where it has been a merely undisciplined and irregular force, it has often done mischief; and public men, from Demosthenes down, have been lamenting that measures which the statesman has meditated a whole year may be overturned in a day by a woman.  Under our American government we have foolishly attempted to leave out this arm of the service altogether; and much of the alleged dulness of our American history has come from this attempt.  Those who have been trained in the various reforms where woman has taken an equal part—­the anti-slavery reform especially—­know well how much of the energy, the dash, the daring, of those movements have come from her.  A revolution with a woman in it is stronger than the established order that omits her.  It is not that she is superior to man, but she is different from man; and we can no more spare her than we could spare the cavalry from an army.

THE REASON FIRM, THE TEMPERATE WILL

It is a part of the necessary theory of republican government, that every class and race shall be judged by its highest types, not its lowest.  The proposition of the French revolutionary statesman, to begin the work of purifying the world by arresting all the cowards and knaves, is liable to the objection that it would find victims in every circle.  Republican government begins at the other end, and assumes that the community generally has good intentions at least, and some common sense, however it may be with individuals.  Take the very quality which the newspapers so often deny to women,—­the quality of steadiness.  “In fact, men’s great objection to the entrance of the female mind into politics is drawn from a suspicion of its unsteadiness on matters in which the feelings could by any possibility be enlisted.”  Thus says the New York “Nation.”  Let us consider this implied charge against women, and consider it not by generalizing from a single instance,—­“just like a woman,” as the editors would doubtless say, if a woman had done it,—­but by observing whole classes of that sex, taken together.

These classes need some care in selection, for the plain reason that there are comparatively few circles in which women have yet been allowed enough freedom of scope, or have acted sufficiently on the same plane with men, to furnish a fair estimate of their probable action, were they enfranchised.  Still there occur to me three such classes,—­the anti-slavery women, the Quaker women, and the women who conduct philanthropic operations in our large cities.  If the alleged unsteadiness of women is to be felt in public affairs, it would have been felt in these organizations.  Has it been so felt?