Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/59

 at too high a price if it diminished the reasonableness, the justice, the courage, the sense of responsibility to the State, or the love of truth which are the greatest of civil virtues. The State has been built up by men; its welfare depends upon the encouragement of manly qualities. There are two ways in which the authority of women might work evil. It might lead statesmen or stateswomen to judge public conduct by the rules properly applicable to domestic life. Is it inconceivable that a condition of feeling might arise under which, had it existed in 1805, Nelson might have been cashiered because of his relations with Lady Hamilton? Yet 'Trafalgar saved England.' It is possible, again, that women, rightly careful of private morality, might, as things now stand, not recognize fully the duty, to which men of irregular lives have sometimes subordinated all selfish objects, of placing the welfare of the State far above the personal interests of family life. This suspicion, I shall be told, has no fair foundation. I appeal, then, to John Mill. He is a judge whom no suffragist can challenge. He draws a splendid picture