Would women in England, however learned, have been for ages subjected to execution for offences for which men, who could read, were only subjected to burning in the hand and a few months imprisonment?

The principle which governs in these cases, or which has done so hitherto, has been at all times and everywhere the same.  Those who succeed in obtaining power, no matter by what means, will, with rare exceptions, use it for their exclusive benefit.  Often, perhaps generally, this is done in the honest belief that such use is for the best good of all who are affected by it.  A wrong, however, to those upon whom it is inflicted, is none the less a wrong by reason of the good motives of the party by whom it is inflicted.

The condition of subjection in which women have been held is the result of this principle; the result of superior strength, not of superior rights, on the part of men.  Superior strength, combined with ignorance and selfishness, but not with malice.  It is a relic of the barbarism in the shadow of which nations have grown up.  Precisely as nations have receded from barbarism the severity of that subjection has been relaxed.  So long as merely physical power governed in the affairs of the world, the wrongs done to women were without the possibility of redress or relief; but since nations have come to be governed by laws, there is room to hope, though the process may still be a slow one, that injustice in all its forms, or at least political injustice, may be extinguished.  No injustice can be greater than to deny to any class of citizens not guilty of crime, all share in the political power of a state, that is, all share in the choice of rulers, and in the making and administration of the laws.  Persons to which such share is denied, are essentially slaves, because they hold their rights, if they can be said to have any, subject to the will of those who hold the political power.  For this reason it has been found necessary to give the ballot to the emancipated slaves.  Until this was done their emancipation was far from complete.  Without a share in the political powers of the state, no class of citizens has any security for its rights, and the history of nations to which I briefly alluded, shows that women constitute no exception to the universality of this rule.

Great errors, I think, exist in the minds of both the advocates and the opponents of this measure in their anticipation of the immediate effects to be produced by its adoption.  On the one hand it is supposed by some that the character of women would be radically changed—­that they would be unsexed, as it were, by clothing them with political rights, and that instead of modest, amiable and graceful beings, we should have bold, noisy and disgusting political demagogues, or something worse, if anything worse can be imagined.  I think those who entertain such opinions are in error.  The innate character of women is the result of God’s laws, not of man’s, nor can the laws of man affect that character beyond a very slight degree.  Whatever rights may be given to them, and whatever duties may be charged upon them by human laws, their general character will remain unchanged.  Their modesty, their delicacy, and intuitive sense of propriety, will never desert them, into whatever new positions their added rights or duties may carry them.