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 about a subject of the most exciting kind. Would the harmony of most households bear the strain? Would not a husband who cared for his own happiness be apt to say that if his wife wanted it she might have the vote, but that there should be only one vote between them? The most eminent of the living advocates of Female Suffrage suggests that in future agreement in politics will be one of the conditions of marriage; which at all events proves that in his opinion disagreement in politics, if both husband and wife were politicians, would endanger the harmony of married life.

Men are not good housekeepers, and there need not be anything disparaging in saying that women, as a rule, are not likely to be good politicians. Most of them, after all, will be married, and their sphere will be one in which they do not directly feel the effects of good or bad government, which are directly felt by the man who goes forth to labour, and the practical sense of which, more than anything else, forms the political wisdom, such as it is, of the great mass of mankind. Nor would there be anything, generally speaking, to balance the judgment, as it is balanced in men by the variety of practical needs and considerations. Even with male constituencies, particular questions are apt to become too predominant, and to lead to the exaction of tyrannical pledges and to narrow ostracism of conscientious public men. But with Female Suffrage there would probably be always a woman's question, of a kind appealing to sentiment, such as the question of the Contagious Diseases Act, which demagogues would take care to provide, and which would swallow up every other question, and make a clean sweep of all public men who might refuse to take the woman's pledge. With Female Suffrage, the question of the Contagious Diseases Act would probably have made a clean sweep at the last general election of all the best servants of the State.

Mr. Mill had persuaded himself that great capacity for government had been displayed by women, and that there was urgent necessity for bringing them into the management of the State. But he can hardly be serious when he cites as an instance of female rule a constitutional queen whose