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bonnet quiver: and then there were a few further interchanges of volleys in the shape of questions and answers of the most civil description, and the ladies shook hands and parted. Rose had been struck dumb altogether by

the dialogue, in which, trembling and speechless, she had taken no part. When they had gone on for a few yards in silence, she broke down in her effort at self-restraint.

• Mamma, what does she mean?"

“Oh, Rose, do not drive me wild with your folly!” said Mrs. Damerel. "What could she mean but one thing? If you think for one moment, you will have no difficulty in understanding what she means."

(To be continued.)

HIS TWO WIVES.1

BY MARY CLEMMER AMES.

CHAPTER XV. CIRCE SUTHERLAND. — OLD WASH

INGTON.

CYRIL KING'S personal opinion of Circe Sutherland was correct, but Agnes' moral estimate of her was still more acutely accurate. Each looked upon her and judged her from such opposite angles of vision that neither could perceive in her spiritually what the other

saw.

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She certainly was not one of an average type in the society in which she now found herself. It pleased her to recognize in herself an object unusual amid the special human developments which surrounded her. Nevertheless she was the purely natural flower and fruit of the race and life out of which she was born. Into the restless, dazzling atmosphere of a Northern metropolis she brought the languor, the repose, the softness of the far South. But she brought something more. Brain currents from the strong, harsh, metaphysical race of the North, her father's race, ified by temperament, climate, education, by the preponderance of a softer and more sensuous race in her veins, nevertheless made themselves perpetually and unmistakably felt in the action of her clear and subtle brain. All a Creole in teinperament and tastes, she was anything but a Creole in absolute thought-power. Because she thought and comprehended so powerfully what she desired and enjoyed was the central reason why she enjoyed so much and so keenly, and on her own plane possessed such power to create and to increase the enjoyments of others.

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When had she lived for anything but self-indulgence? Never. Indulgence, satisfaction in beauty, music, art, luxury, conquest, - had not these been to her as to her mother, and to many mothers before her, at once the aim and fulfillment of existence? Her father's blood had added only strength and zest to these qualities, in the primal directions. Her childhood and first youth had been one unbroken dream of pleasure. In the imperial summer life on the great plantation, in the winter life in the southern capital wherein she was born, she knew naught but the ministry of slaves, the felicity of being idolized, the pursuits and fulfilment of pleasure through all the infinite forms which great wealth lavishes on its possessors.

The events of her days were the siesta, the bath, the toilette, the evening drive, the theatre, the opera, music, poetry, and fiction. Her maid dressed her, served her faintest wish, read to her; and when she dreamed,

1 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by H. O. HOUGпrox & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

asleep or awake, she did so to the play of the grea fountain in the inner court, and in airs laden with me?

ody, warmth, and fragrance. The problems of destiny. the struggles of daily outer life, the pursuit of knowedge, are as unknown to the Creole woman as to be infant child. Even the inevitable sorrows of humar existence are softened to her, as they are to but fea of her sisters.

In her own home Circe Sutherland's life and dev opment were but those of the many. Her marriage at sixteen wrought no change in her lot. It was the union of an old name and a great estate, rather tha of a girl and boy who knew little of each other, and cared less. Circe was to have the estate, and Dunca Sutherland had the name, which her father wished he to carry through life unchanged.

It was a brief marriage. At eighteen Circe Suther land was a widow and an orphan, with life, the work and a fortune before her. Pretty but unformed at sixteen, at eighteen it was but the dawn of that transcendant loveliness of person which afterwards made her snare and her fame. Her fortune, vested in perpetua funds, and in the care of trustees, yielded her a grea revenue; and by a provision of her father's will, his sister, her Aunt Jessie, was made her companion and personal guardian as long as she remained unmarried Marriage was not in the programme which she mad mentally for herself, in her dreams uuder the magnolla trees by the fountain in the inner court of the old house in New Orleans.

When she left the convent at fifteen, she accompa nied her father to Europe, where she met for the fir time her large-jawed, high cheek-boned cousin Duncan. Scotland was not her native air; she shuddered and shivered till she got away from it. Still there flowey in her veins some of the blood which coursed through the pulses of one enchanting ancestress, whose beauty and whose wiles made her famous even at the court of Louis the Grand. Another race, another climate, a freer age, had given a delicacy, a softness, a subtlety, to the descendant's beauty, which the ancestress had not She was all that the earlier Circe was, but more. primeval elements of each nature were the same. came to France as to her home. Was it not the birthplace and cradle of her mother's race, the sanctuary of their dust? Paris only repeated for her, on a much ampler and more æsthetic scale, the life that had been hers from birth the French life of her French mother. She left it with regret and yearning, and the first inpulse of her delicious freedom was to go back to it.

She went.

The

She

The five years spent in Paris, and in the capitals and art-centres of the Continent, were the educators of Circe Sutherland. They shaped her culture and crystallized her character. These years were one long pursuit of pleasure; but of pleasure in its lower forms never. Her study of music under the best masters would have been labor, had it not been, beside, an inspiration and a passion. It is an exacting art, and in its absorption of her time and thoughts, Circe Sutherland escaped many temptations and not a few snares. For wherever she appeared she created the personal sensation which a woman so young, beautiful, gifted, rich, and unwedded, was sure to win.

She was tempting as an apple of the Hesperides to that large class of men in Europe to whom pleasure is a life-pursuit, and gallantry a fine art. To them, "Aunt Jessie" did not seem to be a very dangerous dragon.

1874.]

HIS TWO WIVES.

5 But more than one lived to find himself the slave of an enchantress whose infantile mouth and child-voice made him sure in the beginning that he was to be her master. A master was something which in this life Circe Sutherland was never to find. She might surrender to a degree; how often that face seemed to say that she did so wholly; but far down in her being, unmoved, was the will which from first to last held her in all ultimates wholly her own. It was the most potent force in her, this passion for freedom, this will that would not brook restraint, that defied coercion. This dominating trait, veiled as it was from sight by the most feminine softness, was the central spring of her thought and action. It forced her beyond the pale of the mother church, whose primal law is obedience. It forced her mentally and spiritually out to drift upon the shoreless seas of speculative philosophy and free thought, whose victims, once out, so rarely ever again cast anchor. She knew no God but naturedivinity of her Edenic forms of beauty, but nature in the human; in its instincts, its impulses, its yearnings, FortuHer God was her own desires. its pleasures. nately for her these were not erratic nor prone to wild Had they been, she must have landed in Tophet long before. Passion was pain, therefore her cintention was never to suffer from passion if she could help it. It had been perfectly easy for her to help it so far. She was too æsthetic, too subtly sensuous, to be easily satisfied with anything. She had met many of the highest rank, of the finest mental endowments and attainments; she had accepted homage from many such. She had fancied herself in love with not a few. But soon or late they had all wearied or offended her mentally in some way, often in an undefinable one, and she came back to her own wilful and pleasureloving soul, more than ever the mistress of herself and

excesses.

of men.

She soon drew to herself a this potent inagnet. coterie larger and more concentrated than had ever surrounded her in a European capital, for the reason that there her sovereignty was divided. Not an American by race or culture, she found herself a more unique and engrossing figure in the new metropolis than she could ever be amid the cultivated ranks of the Old World. She found here what she missed and sighed absolute reverence for womanhood for in vain there for its own sake.

"I prefer the European women of rank to the American women as a rule," she said, "but no man on earth can compare with the American gentlemen. The European is gallant, chivalric sometimes; the American is chivalric often, reverent always."

The homage that was hers held her in a land which she often sighed over as "very crude." "This rush and din, this graceless hurry, is enough "Oh for an hour at the to kill one," she would cry. not nature in the conservatoire, for one evening in Venice, for one day at the Louvre, for a morning at Versailles, with the fountains playing! If I could have Europe, and with it all that is mine here, then life would be perfect. That is impossible, and I must take my choice. Shall it be the perfection of music, of ideal forms, of dead art; or life, love, power? There I live, here I reign. Here I have a kingdom, small, maybe, but it is mine. I stay."

But she had other Had she no heart? Oh, yes. forces in her far stronger. She loved pleasure and power more than she could ever love a lover. Men are women are the the natural prey of such women, as Yet with a difference. legitimate prey of such a man. Circe Sutherland was too kindly in impulse to deliberately work out another's woe, nevertheless this was more than likely to be the result when the more potent forces of her nature had play. Her very love of luxury and ease inade her prefer to see happy, satisfied people about her. She was very amiable and serene in disposition when she was not crossed, and there were few indeed to cross her. Unlike most women of her She had never been type she was fond of women. reconciled at heart to being a woman herself, and it was a feeling of half pity that made her kind to other In choosing, she would have chosen to injure a man rather than a woman, but she had never yet paused in pursuit of an end at the thought of injuring any body. It was her friendship for a woman that brought her first to New York. The attraction which she found herself to be in that friend's parlors was the cause of her establishing one of her own homes in the metropolis. The natural empire of such a woman But Circe Sutherland crossed the ocean is in Europe. at the time when the seed scattered by philosophers of the Eastern Continent in the fallow Western soil had already sprung up and ripened into crude fruit. Of It needed a central these the Affinity Club was one. figure, a centripetal force to draw together and to blend its dissonant forces. Circe Sutherland was this divinity,

women.

She could endure crudeness, rudeness even, in art and in many of the manifestations of society, while the plastic material that waited her own artistic and transmuting touch was the fresh, rich, unwrought mine of human character surrounding her.

By the merest accident the fateful hinges of life ever seem to turn. Cyril King met Circe Sutherland for the first time at the villa of her friend. Anywhere and under any conditions these two persons would have impressed each other. In contrasting beauty one dazzled the other. Each nature held elements of fascination for the the other. The lack of one was the lack of both lack of conscience. Acute in every sensuous and mental direction, in moral sensibility alone both were slow and lethargic. No matter what he did, here was one whose matchless eyes would never question or judge him. Here was one who, basking in the splendor of his gifts, would never turn and stab him with the question, "Is it right?" "Is it wrong." And oh, what would it not be to him, to any man living, the thrilling welcome of that voice, the soft approval of that face, the seductive worship of that lifted glance and smile!

A man of much stronger moral nature than Cyril King could not have failed to receive such impressions from a manner such as Circe Sutherland's. It never occurred to Cyril to silence or to repress them, as they sprung up in his thoughts. The cup of the gods was lifted to his lips at last. Love, flattery, homage, each after its kind had been his; never before recognition, inspiration, worship like this. Circe Sutherland smiled upon all men till she tired of them; but rarely in her life had she smiled upon any man as she smiled upon Cyril King. She was most fascinating because she herself was fascinated, and implied it to the full in voice, in glance, in manner, without one committed word. She was perfectly aware that no homage is so delicate, so subtle, so potent, as this which suggests everything without the limitation of a word. She knew nothing of his personal life or associations when she met him When she learned them from the lips of her first.

friend on the great piazza overlooking the Sound, her interest in him did not lessen, it deepened.

"Why should such a man be so enslaved and bound, forsooth! Shall he starve himself and do her no good? Never," said the queen of the Affinity Club, she whom her worshippers called "the queen of the good, the beautiful, and the true."

The regenerated capital of the nation in which we rejoice to-day is not the one to which Cyril and Agnes came. They reached Washington before the transforming hand of a great organizer had touched and transfigured it. The dawning Paris that it is to-day, no lover of it ever dreamed that it could be then. For he whose genius created and shaped it for its far-off and resplendent future, Peter L'Enfant, already slept. in his forgotten grave. The sunny "circles" now set like emeralds in its broad transverse avenues, brave with flowers and fountains and happy children, then were mimic Sabaras, real indeed in the searing and sifting qualities of their ever-flying sands. No seats set under Norway pines, and in the grateful shadow of honeyed magnolias, then invited the wayfarer in Lafayette Square. The grim image of Jefferson in front of the White House had not then retired to the side grounds, to give place to the central fountain which now pervades the fervid air with its saving coolness. The western side of the Treasury was not begun, the white splendors of the new Navy and War Departments were not dreamed of, and the unwrought marbles of the great Capitol wings still lay untouched in their native quarries.

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The five-minute car with its one sacrificial horse had not then saddened with ceaseless tug the silence of the streets. The same little struggling omnibus which carried John Randolph of Roanoke to and fro from Georgetown to the Capitol still made its tedious and tardy trips, at special hours crammed to the driver's seat with Congressmen. The stately metropolitan blocks now stretching out in every direction then had never appeared outside of the brain of Peter L'Enfant, when he planned his new Paris of the future. Instead, square stately mansions rose at intervals from Capitol Hill to Georgetown Heights; but their next neighbors were very sure to be a hovel or a shop, excepting the historic houses which with their gardens made an unbroken cordon around Lafayette Square.

In the main it was a straggling city of magnificently broad streets and avenues, and quaint, two-story, red brick houses with high, steep, one-sided steps, staring front-doored areas, and peaked dormer windows. Pennsylvania Avenue, majestic in breadth and length, stretching past its "Treasury" crowned Acropolis to its Capitolian Hill, was lined with these two and three story dormer-roofed houses devoted to combined homes and shops. They were like the houses built in the colonial days of New York, which still do service in the Jew quarter of the Bowery, and not at all like the stately buildings the world had a right to expect would line the grand avenue of the capital of a great nation. To Agnes they looked smaller and lower than the compactly builded blocks of provincial Ulm.

The avenue was never crowded, not even when the government departments poured out their tides of workers. There was always room and to spare on it for old men, women, and little children; also for the fine lady, the rushing,representative, the stately senator, the weary slave. Room and to spare on the great

thoroughfare for all its vehicles; for the little rocking omnibus, the showy equipages of the government functionaries and foreign embassadors, for the one-mule market cart from Maryland, and the great primeval cotton-topped wagon from Virginia with its three horses, a slave astride the leader. There was room and to spare on the grand avenue of the capital of the United States for all these vehicles. They never ran

into each other.

(To be continued.)

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HOLLOW AMID THE FERNS.

THE hill opposite one end of Bathsheba's dwelling ex tended into an uncultivated tract of land, covered at this season with tall thickets of brake fern, plump and diaphanous from recent rapid growth, and radiant in hues of clear and untainted green.

bristling ball of gold in the west still swept the tips of the At eight o'clock this midsummer evening, whilst the ferns with its long, luxuriant rays, a soft brushing-by of garments might have been heard among them, and Bathsheba appeared in their midst, their soft, feathery arms caressing her up to her shoulders. She paused, turned. went back over the hill and down again to her own door. whence she cast a farewell glance upon the spot she had just left, having resolved not to remain near the place after

all.

She saw a dim spot of artificial red moving round the shoulder of the rise. It disappeared on the other side.

She waited one minute two minutes - thought of Troy's disappointment at her non-fulfilment of a promised engagement, tossed on her hat again, ran up the garden, clambered over the bank and followed the original direc tion. She was now literally trembling and panting at this her temerity in such an errant undertaking; her breath frequent light. Yet go she must. came and went quickly, and her eyes shone with an inShe reached the verge of a pit in the middle of the ferns. tom, looking up towards her. "I heard you rustling through the fern before I saw you," he said, coming up and giving her his hand to help her down the slope.

Troy stood in the bot

with a top diameter of about thirty feet, and shallow enough The pit was a hemispherical concave, naturally formed, to allow the sunshine to reach their heads. Standing in the centre, the sky overhead was met by a circular horizon of fern this grew nearly to the bottom of the slope and then abruptly ceased. The middle within the belt of verduer was floored with a thick flossy carpet of moss and grass intermingled, so yielding that the foot was half buried within it.

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raised it into the sunlight, gleamed a sort of greeting, like "Now," said Troy, producing the sword, which, as he a living thing, "first, we have four right and four left cuts; four right and four left thrusts. Infantry cuts and guards are more interesting than ours, to my mind; but they are not so swashing. They have seven cuts and three thrusts. So much as a preliminary. Well, next, our cut one is as if you were sowing your corn-so.' sheba saw a sort of rainbow, upside down in the air, and Troy's arm was still again. "Cut two, as if you were hedging So. Three, as if you were reaping-so. Four, as if you were threshing-in that way. Then the same on the left. The thrusts are these: one, two, three, four, right; one, two, three, four, left." He repeated them. "Have 'em again?" he said. "One, two"

She hurriedly interrupted: "I'd rather not; though I don't mind your twos and fours; but your ones and threes are terrible "

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Very well. I'll let you off the ones and threes. Next, cuts, points, and guards all together." Troy duly exhibited

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them.

"Then there's pursuing practice, in this way." He gave the movements as before. "There, those are the stereotyped forms. The infantry have two most diabolical upward cuts, which we are two humane to use. Like this -three, four."

"How murderous and bloodthirsty!"

"They are rather deathy. Now I'll be more interesting and let you see some loose play giving all the cuts and points, infantry and cavalry, quicker than lightning, and as promiscuously with just enough rule [to regulate instinct and yet not to fetter it. You are my antagonist, with this difference from real warfare, that I shall miss you every time by one hair's breadth, or perhaps two. Mind you don't flinch, whatever you do."

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I'll be sure not to!" she said invincibly.

He pointed to about a yard in front of him. Bathsheba's adventurous spirit was beginning to find some grains of relish in these highly novel proceedings. She took up her position as directed, facing Troy.

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Now just to learn whether you have pluck enough to let me do what I wish, I'll give you a preliminary test." He flourished the sword by way of introduction number two, and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and blade of the sword were darting with pa gleam towards her left side, just above her hip; then of their reappearance on her right side, emerging as it were from between her ribs, having apparently passed through her body. The third item of consciousness was that of seeing the same sword, perfectly clean and free from blood held vertically in Troy's hand (in the position technically called "recover swords "). All was as quick as electricity.

"Oh!" she cried out in affright, pressing her hand to her side. “Have you run me through? - no, you have not! Whatever have you done!"

"I have not touched you," said Troy quietly. "It was mere sleight of hand. The sword passed behind you. Now you are not afraid, are you? Because if you are I can't perform. I give my word that I will not only not hurt you, but not once touch you."

"I don't think I am afraid.

will not hurt me?"

"Quite sure."

"Is the sword very sharp?"

You are quite sure you

"Oh no- only stand as still as a statue. Now!"

In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba's eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun's rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven - all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy's reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circumambient gleams were accompanied by a keen sibilation that was almost a whistling also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand.

Never since the broadsword became the national weapon had there been more dexterity shown in its management than by the hands of Sergeant Troy, and never had he been in such splendid temper for the performance as now in the evening sunshine among the ferns with Bathsheba. It may safely be asserted with respect to the closeness of his cuts, that had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been a complete mould of Bathsheba's figure.

Behind the luminous streams of this aurora militaris, she could see the hue of Troy's sword-arm, spread in a scarlet haze over the space covered by its motions, like a twanged bowstring, and behind all Troy himself, mostly facing her: sometimes, to show the rear cuts, half turned away, his eye nevertheless always keenly measuring her breadth and outline, and his lips tightly closed in sustained effort. Next, his movements lapsed slower, and she could see them individually. The hissing of the sword had ceased, and he stopped entirely.

That outer loose lock of hair wants tidying," he said,

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"I won't touch you at all not even your hair. I am only going to kill that caterpillar settling on you. Now : still!"

It appeared that a caterpillar had come from the fern and chosen the front of her boddice as his resting-place. She saw the point glisten towards her bosom, and seemingly enter it. Bathsheba closed her eyes in the full persuasion that she was killed at last. However, feeling just as usual, she opened them again.

"There it is look!" said the sergeant, holding his sword before her eyes.

The caterpillar was spitted upon its point.

"Why, it is magic!" said Bathsheba, amazed.

"Oh no- - dexterity. I merely gave point to your bosom where the caterpillar was, and instead of running you through checked the extension a thousandth of an inch short of your surface."

"But how could you chop off a curl of my hair with a sword that has no edge?"

"No edge! This sword will shave like a razor. Look here."

He touched the palm of his hand with the blade, and then, lifting it, showed her a thin shaving of scarf-skin dangling therefrom.

"But you said before beginning that it was blunt and couldn't cut me!"

"That was to get you to stand still, and so ensure your safety. The risk of injuring you through your moving was too great not to compel me to tell you an untruth to obviate it."

She shuddered. "I have been within an inch of my life, and didn't know it!"

"More precisely speaking, you have been within halt an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times."

"Cruel, cruel, 'tis of you!"

"You have been perfectly safe, nevertheless. My sword never errs." And Troy returned the weapon to the scabbard.

Bathsheba, overcome by a hundred tumultuous feelings resulting from the scene, abstractedly sat down on a tuft of heather.

"I must leave you now," said Troy softly. "And I'll venture to take and keep this in remembrance of you."

She saw him stoop to the grass, pick up the winding lock which he had severed from her manifold tresses, twist it round his fingers, unfasten a button in the breast of his coat, and carefully put it inside. She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

He drew near and said, "I must be leaving you." He drew nearer still. A minute later and she saw his scarlet form disappear amid the ferny thicket, almost in a flash, like a brand swiftly waved.

That minute's interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin.

The circumstance had been the gentle dip of Troy's mouth downwards upon her own. He had kissed her.

(To be continued.)

FEMALE SUFFRAGE.

BY GOLDWIN SMITH.

MR. FORSYTH'Ss bill for removing the Electoral Disabili ties of Women, the second reading of which is at hand, has received less attention than the subject deserves. The Residuum was enfranchised for the sake of its vote by the leaders of a party which for a series of years had been denouncing any extension of the suffrage, even to the most intelligent artisans, on the ground that it would place political power in unfit hands. An analogous stroke of strategy, it seems, is now meditated by the same tacticians in the case of Female Suffrage, the motion in favor of which is brought forward by one of their supporters, and has already received the adhesion of their chief. The very foundations of Society are touched when Party tampers with the relations of the sexes.

In England the proposal at present is to give the suffrage only to unmarried women being householders. But the drawing of this hard-and-fast line is at the outset contested by the champions of Woman's Rights; and it seems impossible that the distinction should be maintained. The lodger-franchise is evidently the vanishing point of the feudal connection between political privilege and the pos. session of houses or land. The suffrage will become personal in England, as it has elsewhere. If a property qualification remains, it will be one embracing all kinds of property: money settled on a married woman for her separate use, as well as the house or lodgings occupied by a widow or a spinster. In the counties already, married women have qualifications in the form of land settled to their separate use; and the notion that a spinster in lodgings is specially entitled to the suffrage as the head of a household, is one of those pieces of metaphysics in which the politicians who affect to scorn anything metaphysical are apt themselves unwarily to indulge. If the present motion is carried, the votes of the female householders, with that system of election pledges which is now enabling minorities, and even small minorities, to control national legislation, will form the crowbar by which the next barrier will be speedily forced.

Marriage itself, as it raises the position of a woman in the eyes of all but the very radical section of the Woman's Rights party, could hardly be treated as politically penal. And yet an Act conferring the suffrage on married women would probably be the most momentous step that could be taken by any legislature, since it would declare the family not to be a political unit, and for the first time authorize a wife, and make it in certain cases her duty as a citizen, to act publicly in opposition to her husband. Those at least who hold the family to be worth as much as the state will think twice before they concur in such a change.

With the right of electing must ultimately go the right of being elected. The contempt with which the candidature of Mrs. Victoria Woodhull for the Presidency was received by some of the advocates of Female Suffrage in America only showed that they had not considered the consequences of their own principles. Surely she who gives the mandate is competent herself to carry it. Under the parliamentary system, whatever the forms and phrases may be, the constituencies are the supreme arbiters of the national policy, and decide not only who shall be the leg islators, but what shall be the course of legislation. They have long virtually appointed the Ministers, and now they appoint them actually. Twice the Government has been changed by a plebiscite, and on the second occasion the Budget was submitted to the constituencies as directly as ever it was to the House of Commons. There may be some repugnance, natural or traditional, to be overcome in admitting women to seats in Parliament; but there is also some repugnance to be overcome in throwing them into the turmoil of contested elections. in which, as soon as Female Suffrage is carried, some ladies will unquestionably claim their part.

There are members of Parliament who shrink from the

step which they are now urged to take, but who fancy the they have no choice left them because the municipal fras chise has already been conceded. The municipal franchise was no doubt intended to be the thin end of the wedge Nevertheless there is a wide step between this and the national franchise; between allowing female influence to prevail in the disposition of school rates, or other loca rates, and allowing it to prevail in the supreme government of the country. To see that it is so, we have only to inagine the foreign policy of England determined by the women, while that of other countries is determined by the men; and this in the age of Bismarck.

The writer of this paper himself once signed a petitio for Female Household Suffrage got up by Mr. Mill. He has always been for enlarging the number of active citizers as much as possible, and widening the basis of government in accordance with the maxim, which seems to him the sum of political philosophy, "That is the best form of gov ernment which doth most actuate and dispose all parts and members of the commonwealth to the common good." H had not, when he signed the petition, seen the public life of women in the United States. But he was led to recor sider what he had done, and prevented from going further, by finding that the movement was received with mistrus by some of the best and most sensible women of his a quaintance, who feared that their most valuable privileges and the deepest sources of their happiness, were being jeopardized to gratify the political aspirations of a few e their sex. For the authority of Mr. Mill, in all cases where his judgment was unclouded, the writer felt and still feels great respect. But since that time, Mr. Mill's autobiog raphy has appeared, and has revealed the history of his extraordinary and almost portentous education, the singu lar circumstances of his marriage, his hallucination (for it surely can be called nothing less) as to the unparallele genius of his wife, and peculiarities of character and tenperament such as could not fail to prevent him from fully appreciating the power of influences which, whatever our philosophy may say, reign and will continue to reign su preme over questions of this kind. To him marriage was a union of two philosophers in the pursuit of truth; and in his work on the position and destiny of women, not on does he scarcely think of children, but sex and its in fluences seem hardly to be present to his mind. Of the distinctive excellence and beauty of the female characterit 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 ex istence. 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 rep resent the lot of the woman as having always been deter mined 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 of the woman has been determined from age to age by cir cumstances 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

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