Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/446

430 and beauty of the female character it does not appear that he had formed any idea, though he dilates on the special qualities of the female mind.

Mr. Mill has allowed us to see that his opinions as to the political position of women were formed early in his life, probably before he had studied history rationally, perhaps before the rational study of history had even come into existence. The consequence, with all deference to his great name be it said, is that his historical presentment of the case is fundamentally unsound. He and his disciples represent the lot of the woman as having always been determined by the will of the man, who, according to them, has willed that she should be the slave, and that he should be her master and her tyrant. "Society, both in this" (the case of marriage) "and other cases, has preferred to attain its object by foul rather than by fair means; but this is the only case in which it has substantially persisted in them even to the present day." This is Mr, Mill's fundamental assumption; and from it, as every rational student of history is now aware, conclusions utterly erroneous as well as injurious to humanity must flow. The lot of the woman has not been determined by the will of the man, at least in any considerable degree. The lot both of the man and the woman has been determined from age to age by circumstances over which the will of neither of them had much control, and which neither could be blamed for accepting or failing to reverse. Mr. Mill, and those who with him assume that the man has always willed that he should himself enjoy political rights, and that the woman should be his slave, forget that it is only in a few countries that man does enjoy political rights; and that, even in those few countries, freedom is the birth almost of yesterday. It may probably be said that the number of men who have really and freely exercised the suffrage up to the present time is not much greater than the number of those who have in different ages, and in various ways, laid down their lives or made personal sacrifices of other kinds in bringing the suffrage into existence.

In the early stages of civilization the family was socially and legally as well as politically a unit. Its head represented the whole household before the tribe, the state, and all persons and bodies without; while within he exercised absolute power over all the members, male as well as female, over his sons as well as over his wife and daughters. On the death of the head of a family his eldest son stepped into his place, and became the representative and protector of the whole household, including the widow of the deceased chief. This system, long retained in conservative Rome, was there the source of the national respect for authority, and, by an expansion of feeling from the family to the community, of the patriotism which produced and sustained Roman greatness. But its traces lingered far down in history. It was not male tyranny that authorized a Tudor queen to send members of the royal household to the Tower by her personal