Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/453

Rh male. No woman can imagine that her sex can execute, or in case of rebellion reassert, the law; for that they must look entirely to the men. The men would be conscious of this, and, if any law were made exclusively in the interest of the women, and in contradiction to the male sense of justice, they would refuse to carry it into effect. In the United States there have been intimations, on the part of the women, of a desire to make a very lavish use of capital punishment, untrammeled by the technical rules of evidence, for offenses or supposed offenses against the sex. The men would, of course, refuse execution; law would be set at defiance, and government would be overturned. But the bad effects of the public consciousness that executive force the rude but indispensable basis of law—had been partly removed, and that the law was being made by those who had not the power to carry it into effect, would not be limited to manifest instances of the influence of sex in legislation. In cases where, as in Jamaica, an elective government has rested on two races, equal, legally speaking, in political power, but of which one was evidently inferior in real force to the other, reverence for law has been weak, and the result has been disastrous. There can be little doubt that, as soon as the Federal bayonets are removed, there will be another case of the same kind in the Southern States; laws made by negro majorities will be set at defiance by the stronger race. To personal despotism or class domination civilization can put an end, but it cannot eliminate force.

It is very likely that in England the women, to reform drunken husbands, would vote for extreme prohibitory measures against liquor; but the difficulty of carrying such legislation into effect, great as it is already, could hardly fail to be much increased by the feeling that it was the act of the women, and the consequence would probably be contempt, and perhaps open defiance, of the law. Female legislation with regard to education, in the interest of clerical ascendency, would be apt to be attended by the same effects.

Elective government, with the liberty of opinion and the power of progress which are its concomitants, has been brought into existence by the most terrible throes of humanity. When perfected and firmly established, it will, as we hope, and have good grounds for believing, give to reason and justice an ascendency which they have never had before in human affairs, and increase the happiness of all by making private interest subordinate to the public good. But its condition, if we look at the world as a whole, is still exceedingly precarious. All the powers of class interest, of sybaritism, of superstition, are arrayed against it, and have vast forces at their command, including the great standing armies of Europe, while they find accomplices in the lassitude, the alarm, the discouragement caused by the revolutionary storms which, unhappily, are almost inevitable attendants upon the birth of a new order of things. Its existence having been so far a