Page:The Enfranchisement of Women, the law of the land.pdf/5

5 constitution set a woman to rule over us—to negative by her single veto the unanimous voice of both Houses of Parliament—to declare war, make peace, or conclude treaties binding us all—while we pronounce her congenitally incapable, by reason of her sex, to appreciate the qualifications of a single commoner. Perhaps the most perfect reductio ad absurdum this regard is, that the State itself, by express Act of Parliament, has created and subsidised the office of schoolmistress. She must pass a stringent preliminary examination of her capacity to teach all that schoolmasters impart to the male sex. Oh, yes; she can instruct electors, but she is without the capacity herself to elect. She may be a member, president of the school board, vote for common council or aldermen, be a councillor or alderman to administer the municipal affairs of a city of 500,000 inhabitants; but no, she cannot be an elector of Little Peddlington.

Sex—what is it but a zoologic expression, referring solely to animal functions? Distinctive among the brutes "without discourse of reason," and ruled by blind instincts and prone appetites, is it to be applied to the immortal part of us? The human soul is of no sex. Can we tell the gender of the mind or intellect? Is not woman, as man, fashioned in the image of her maker Is there one mental faculty which has been omitted in her cerebral economy? Even if it could be contended that some intellectual power has, by the habits of society or the circumstances of her position, been unequally or imperfectly developed, does not the same answer apply in her case as that which is given to the objection to the enfranchisement male stupidity—the exercise of the function will educate for its due discharge? The Turks, more consistent than we, degrade their women to a status below their own, as we do; but, unlike us, they deny that they have souls.

The plain truth is, the objection to female enfranchisement is founded on utter ignorance of the natural history of the genus homo. There are countries in which the body-guard of the sovereign consists of his wives. The amazon is no myth, but a present reality. There are populous tribes in which the social position of the sexes is reversed, and the men, entirely subordinated to the women, fully recognise their own as a purely subservient status, deferring in everything to their