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. The interest of the whole community must be the test. As to natural rights, they must be sought by those who desire them, not in communities, but in the primeval woods, where the available rights of women will be small.

The question whether female suffrage on an extended scale is good for the whole community is probably identical, practically speaking, with the question whether it is good for us to have free institutions or not. Absolute monarchy is founded on personal loyalty. Free institutions are founded on the love of liberty, or, to speak more properly, on the preference of legal to personal government. But the love of liberty and the desire of being governed by law alone appear to be characteristically male. The female need of protection, of which, so long as women remain physically weak, and so long as they are mothers, it will be impossible to get rid, is apparently accompanied by a preference for personal government, which finds its proper satisfaction in the family, but which gives an almost uniform bias to the political sentiments of women. The account commonly accepted of the reactionary tendency which all admit to be generally characteristic of the sex, is, that they are priest-ridden. No doubt many of them are priest-ridden, and female suffrage would give a vast increase of power to the clergy. But the cause is probably deeper and more permanent, being, in fact, the sentiment inherent in the female temperament, which again is formed by the normal functions and circumstances of the sex. And if this is the case, to give women the franchise is simply to give them the power of putting an end, actually and virtually, to all franchises together. It may not be easy to say beforehand exactly what course the demolition of free institutions by female suffrage would take. In the United States probably some woman's favourite would be elected President, and re-elected till his power became personal, and perhaps dynastic. In that country, assuredly, the Republic could not survive the addition of the female vote to all the anti-republican or non-republican elements already existing, such as negro suffrage and Irish and South-German immigration. But there can lie little doubt that, in all cases,