queen whose excellence consists in never doing any act of government except under the guidance of her ministers. The queens regnant or consort, before our monarchy became constitutional, who may be said to have wielded power, are the Empress-Queen Matilda, Eleanor, the wife of Henry II., Isabella, the wife of Edward II., Margaret of Anjou, Mary, Elizabeth, and Henrietta Maria. Not much can be made of this list, when it is considered that both Margaret of Anjou and Henrietta Maria were, by their temper, principal causes of civil wars, and that the statesmanship of Elizabeth has totally collapsed between Mr. Fronde's first volume and his last, while her feminine relations with Leicester and other favorites have contracted a much more ominous complexion in a political as well as in a moral point of view. On the other hand, it is probable that Eleanor, the wife of Edward I., and certain that Caroline, the wife of George II., rendered, in a womanly way, high services to the state. Mr. Mill says, from his experience at the India office, that the queens in India are better than the kings. But the reason is obvious. British protection has suspended the operation of the rude checks on the vices of Indian despots, and a woman brought up in the zenana though she cannot possibly be a good ruler, may well be better than a hog or a tiger.
Neither the cases of queens, however, nor those of female regents of the Netherlands, to which Mr. Mill gives so strange a turn (as though Charles V. and Philip II. had preferred females on account of their ability to male members of the house), are in point. They all belong to the hereditary system, under which these ladies were called to power by birth or appointment, and surrounded by counselors from whose policy it is scarcely possible to distinguish that of the sovereign. Under the elective system, women would have to make their own way to seats in Parliament and to office by the same means as male politicians, by canvassing, stumping, wrestling with competitors in debate; and the female character would be exposed to influences entirely different from those which operated on Isabella of Castile.
Without pressing the argument against "premiers in the family way" too far, it may safely be said that the women who would best represent their sex, and whose opinions would be worth most, would be generally excluded from public life by conjugal and maternal duty. Success with popular constituencies would probably fall to the lot, not of the grave matrons and spinsters whom Mr. Mill evidently has in view, but of dashing adventuresses, whose methods of captivating their constituents would often be by no means identical with legislative wisdom, or calculated to increase our veneration for their sex.
Mr. Mill is the real father of the whole movement; the arguments of its other champions are mere reproductions of his. Whatever biased his mind, therefore, ought to be carefully noted; and again it must be said that he was possessed by an illusion—an illusion beautiful and touching, but still an illusion—as to the political genius of his wife.
