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destruction of the family." Does it follow from this that female, or rather mixed, legislatures would go further in the same direction? for this seems to be the drift of this portion of Mr. Smith's remarks. In an earlier part of his essay he had told us that it was inherent in the nature of women to be subservient to the clergy: he now suggests that, if admitted to the suffrage, they would probably enact the abrogation of the marriage tie. Perhaps he sees his way to reconciling these two opinions, but it is not obvious on the surface, any more than it is easy to reconcile the latter with what he tells us a few lines lower down, that women have a far deeper interest in maintaining the stringency of the marriage tie than men. If so, then, one naturally asks, why will they not use their influence to maintain it? Are they such imbeciles as not to discern their interest in so important a matter, or, discerning it, to throw their weight into the scale adverse to their most vital concerns? Here again Mr. Smith answers himself: he tells us, "the women themselves [I presume the Mænads] have now, it is said, begun to draw back."
I now turn to a side of the question on which Mr. Smith lays very great stress, and of which I am not in the least disposed to underrate the importance—the extension of the suffrage to married women. I do not yield to Mr. Smith, or to anyone, in the firmness of my conviction that the family is at the bottom of our existing civilization, and I should, for my part, regard as dearly purchased any gain in material or political well-being which should introduce a jar or weakness into this pivot of our social system. But I believe that to open political life to women, far from being fraught with the disastrous consequences Mr. Smith anticipates, would, taking things in their entire scope, be productive of quite opposite effects. If I were asked to name the principal element of weakness in the family as things now stand, I should have no hesitation in pointing to the want of sufficient subjects of common interest between man and woman. It is owing to this that matrimonial engagements are entered into so rarely
