Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/10

10 Are women's rights not rights? Is it fair that the son should be armed with all the privileges and facilities of making his way in the world, and have the family estate handed over by the law entirely to himself, while his sister is at once to be left without the means of living, and disinherited by the very laws she is forced to obey, and by the State that taxes her without her consent, to uphold a system that robs her of her natural patrimony? How many a loving father has seen a noble estate, with its ancestral halls and monumental oaks, decreed by the law itself to pass away from his only child, the last of a long and noble line, merely because she was helpless and a woman, and some "accident of an accident," the "tenth transmitter of a foolish face," far remote of kin, and having too much already, was of the dominant, perhaps only the domineering, gender. This cause is not the crotchet of a mere social oddity. The earnestness it inspires is not the eccentricity of ill-directed enthusiasm, or the mere errand of the female Quixote. We all owe a heartfelt tribute of respect to those who for its sake have patiently borne the misconstruction to which it has subjected them—the quips, and sentences, and those "paper bullets of the brain," which, because they are so light, hit all the harder in the small talk of conventional frivolity.

Let them persevere, and take heart of grace. "In due season they will reap if they faint not." The law of England is with them, although the lawyers are not. It was the deliberate and calculated statement of the Prime Minister, in his place in Parliament, that the English of Acts of Parliament and their meaning were plain enough. The obscurity lay in the ingenuity of their interpreters. It is not St. Stephen's that has shut its doors against women, but Westminster Hall. They are electors by the law of the land, and disfranchised only by the casuistry of the courts. A single decision of the Court of Common Pleas, from which there is no appeal, even to itself, degrades seventeen and a half millions of British subjects from the most clearly established of public rights. The larger half of the rational creation summarily snuffed out of political existence, by Mr. Justice Bovill! Nulla vestigia retrorsum from his irreversible decree! "Think of that, Master Brook!" Is it permissible to presume so far as to whisper in the ear of Queen, Lords, and Commons, that the exercise of this power