efforts in which multitudes of them have perished, and they have shared with their families all its substantial advantages. As they have fought, so they have legislated, for their wives and children as well as for themselves. For their wives and children as well as for themselves they have reclaimed the earth, made it fruitful, and bridged the sea. What Mr. Mill calls slavery has, in the main, been the guardianship of affection, a guardianship with which the women could not have dispensed, though the conception evidently never entered Mr. Mill's mind. If the man has had authority over the woman, the woman has had authority over her child. The indissolubility of marriage, which Mr. Mill calls slavery, and which is his capital grievance, is at least as much a restraint upon the roving passions of the man as upon the affections of the woman; in truth, the very fact that man has instituted monogamy and made marriage indissoluble is the most conclusive answer to Mr. Mill's charge. So far from women not being able to get justice in a court under the existing law, the difficulty is to get justice against a woman, and both in America and in England male legislatures have been passing laws respecting the property relations of married people, which in effect release the wife from all the obligations and liabilities of matrimony, leaving the husband as fast bound as ever. American ladies who demand that marriage shall not be a union, but only "a copartnership," would soon flinch from the consequences of their own principle. That domestic outrage exists in barbarous classes is too true; and it is committed as often perhaps by women against children as by men against women, though the complaints of the children are not so often heard; but fifty votes given to the unhappy victims would not correct the brutality of a savage home. The women who head this movement do not really want equality; they want and expect to retain, with political power and freedom from marital control, all the present privileges of their sex. They do not want to be thrust to the wall by male strength in a struggle for existence, to have the penal law extended to them in all its severity, or to be compelled to do the rough and dangerous work of the world. But they will find that they can not have both equality and privilege, or at once renounce and retain the guardianship of affection. Chivalry may linger, as sentiments do linger, for a season; but it will soon fall into the grave of the conditions on which it depends. Perhaps the sex generally will find that they have paid dear for the fancy of the few who wish to enter into public life.
What would be the effect of public life on female character, and the effect of female intervention on the character of public life, are questions upon which some light has been thrown by our actual experience since the commencement of this agitation. About the most violent and scurrilous production which has appeared in the American press for many a day was a series of letters written by a female politician; and it is remarkable that her object was to defend the system of favor-
