Women are no doubt more sensitive than men upon matters of taste and breeding.  This is partly from a greater average fineness of natural perception, and partly because their more secluded lives give them less of miscellaneous contact with the world.  If Maud Muller and her husband had gone to board at the same boarding-house with the Judge and his wife, that lady might have held aloof from the rustic bride, simply from inexperience in life, and not knowing just how to approach her.  But the Judge, who might have been talking politics or real estate with the young farmer on the doorsteps that morning, would certainly find it easier to deal with him as a man and a brother at the dinner-table.  From these different causes women get the credit or discredit of being more aristocratic than men are; so that in England the Tory supporters of female suffrage base it on the ground that these new voters at least will be conservative.

But, on the other hand, it is women, even more than men, who are attracted by those strong qualities of personal character which are always the antidote to aristocracy.  No bold revolutionist ever defied the established conventionalisms of his times without drawing his strongest support from women.  Poet and novelist love to depict the princess as won by the outlaw, the gypsy, the peasant.  Women have a way of turning from the insipidities and proprieties of life to the wooer who has the stronger hand; from the silken Darnley to the rude Bothwell.  This impulse is the natural corrective to the aristocratic instincts of womanhood; and though men feel it less, it is still, even among them, one of the supports of republican institutions.  We need to keep always balanced between the two influences of refined culture and of native force.  The patrician class, wherever there is one, is pretty sure to be the more refined; the plebeian class, the more energetic.  That woman is able to appreciate both elements is proof that she is quite capable of doing her share in social and political life.  This English clergyman’s wife, who devotes her soul to the trimmings and gored skirts of the lower orders, is no more entitled to represent her sex than are those ladies who give their whole attention to the “novel and intricate bonnets” advertised this season on Broadway.

MRS. BLANK’S DAUGHTERS

Mrs. Blank, of Far West—­let us not draw her from the “sacred privacy of woman” by giving the name or place too precisely—­has an insurmountable objection to woman’s voting.  So the newspapers say; and this objection is that she does not wish her daughters to encounter disreputable characters at the polls.

It is a laudable desire, to keep one’s daughters from the slightest contact with such persons.  But how does Mrs. Blank precisely mean to accomplish this?  Will she shut up the maidens in a harem?  When they go out, will she send messengers through the streets to bid people hide their faces, as when an Oriental queen is passing?  Will she send them travelling on camels, veiled by yashmaks? Will she prohibit them from being so much as seen by a man, except when a physician must be called for their ailments, and Miss Blank puts her arm through a curtain, in order that he may feel her pulse and know no more?