Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/85

 true. No one dreams that they ought to be constables, officers of police, governors of gaols, or coastguards. No woman is bound, as is a man, to attend the Justices in suppressing a riot upon pain of fine and imprisonment. All this is no absolute ground for excluding women from a share in sovereign power, but it does afford a ground which is not palpably unjust for their exclusion from political authority.

Distinctions of rights founded upon sex have often given rise to injustice, but they have this in their favour—they rest upon a difference not created by social conventions or by human prejudice and selfishness, or by accidental circumstances (such as riches and poverty), which split society into classes, but upon the nature of things. This difference is as far-reaching as it is natural and immutable. It is one which, just because it is permanent and unchangeable, every honest thinker must take into account. That men are men and women are women is an obvious platitude; but it contains an undeniable truth which, like some other unwelcome facts, rhetoric, even when, as with Mill, it masquerades as strict