Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/70

 it with justice. Still, it remains the height of folly to entrust the guidance of the State, at a time when the country is surrounded by perils of all kinds, to unskilled apprentices who have no experience in piloting the commonwealth through pressing dangers. The most sagacious advocates of women's rights do not deny that each sex exhibits virtues which are found only in a less degree, or, it may be, not at all, in the other. We hear, as I have pointed out to you, much of the keenness of women's personal sympathies, of their capacity for passionate and often generous emotion; we are told that either nature or training, or both in combination, may lead women to see more readily than men the minute details on which depends the transaction of business. Yet it would not be unfair to say that, while women often perceive more readily than men the actual facts before them, they have a less firm grasp on principles; that a woman, in short, compared with a man of equal ability, may have a better eye for the circumstances around her, but has less of foresight. She has assuredly also less of tenacity.

From differences, upon some of which, in