Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/455

Rh the Reign of Terror, and in the revolt of the Commune, the women notoriously rivaled the men in fury and atrocity. The same was the case in the late American Civil War. What has been the effect of public life on the character of the women who have thrown themselves into it in the United States can be doubted by no human being; and our experience of female agitations in this country seems to tell pretty much the same tale. That party politics require mitigation, and perhaps something more, may be readily admitted; but we are not likely to make the caldron boil less fiercely by flinging into it female character and home.

That home would escape disturbance it is surely difficult to believe. We are told that a difference of religion between man and wife does not produce unhappiness. The fact may be doubted when the difference is strong. But religion is an affair of the other world; and it does not, at all events it need not, bring people into direct, much less into public collision in this world. A man and his wife, taking opposite sides in politics, would be brought into direct and public collision, especially if they happened to be active politicians, about a subject of the most exciting kind. Would the harmony of most households bear the strain? Would not a husband who cared for his own happiness be apt to say that if his wife wanted it she might have the vote, but that there should be only one vote between them?

Men are not good house-keepers, and there need not be any thing disparaging in saying that women, as a rule, are not likely to be good politicians. Most of them, after all, will be married, and their sphere will be one in which they do not directly feel the effects of good or bad government, which are directly felt by the man who goes forth to labor, and the practical sense of which, more than any thing else, forms the political wisdom, such as it is, of the great mass of mankind. Nor would there be any thing, generally speaking, to balance the judgment, as it is balanced in men by the variety of practical needs and considerations. Even with male constituencies, particular questions are apt to become too predominant, and to lead to the exaction of tyrannical pledges and to narrow ostracism of conscientious public men. But with female suffrage there would probably be always a woman's question, of a kind appealing to sentiment, such as the question of the contagious diseases act, which demagogues would take care to provide, and which would swallow up every other question, and make a clean sweep of all public men who might refuse to take the woman's pledge. With female suffrage, the question of the contagious diseases act would probably have made a clean sweep, at the last general election, of all the best servants of the state.

Mr. Mill had persuaded himself that great capacity for government had been displayed by women, and that there was urgent necessity for bringing them into the management of the state. But he can hardly be serious when he cites as an instance of female rule a constitutional