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WOMEN'S WRONGS.

"Leaflet of Clifton," 1867.

DEADERS of History and Lawyers are aware that Women's Wrongs are an ancient and terribly persistent fact. American law disfranchised, in one sentence, negroes, criminals, women, idiots, and minors.

Readers of newspapers cannot be ignorant of the miseries endured by wives from brutal husbands.

In ordinary decorous families, sons at lavish expense are trained to self-support. The daughters in one class have nothing spent on their education; in another, are educated as elegant ornaments of a drawing-room, where they live in luxury for a parent's delight; yet, when he dies, and their youth is spent, they are often turned adrift into comparative poverty, incompetent for self-help.

When complaint is made of this, the ascendant sex graciously tells them, "they ought to marry;" and this in a country where women are counted by the hundred thousand more numerous than men ; where also men do not universally accept the state of marriage.

Meanwhile, the law is made as if to dissuade the woman from such a remedy. If she dare to adopt it, it instantly strips her of all her property, great or little; and if she earn anything, authorizes her husband to seize it by force. In the Marriage Service, the husband, as if in mockery, says: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow:" while the law allows him to gamble away her whole fortune the day after the marriage, or to live in riotous indulgence on her money and give to her the barest necessaries of life. Nay, not even these, if he so insult and torment her, that she will not live with him. He may maliciously refuse her the sight of her own children, and put them under the care of a paramour, to be trained into hatred of their mother. And if, to gain one sight of them, she return to his house for two days, the law holds her to have "condoned" all his offences, however flagrant.

The richer classes guard in great measure against the unfairness of the law to the wife in money matters, by the expensive, cumbrous, and often inconvenient system of Trustees. The poorer cannot afford it; nor is it at all applicable to a woman's earnings. From day to day we see that a wife may sink all at once into the depths of misery, if her husband be corrupted into drunkenness.

An extract from the proceedings of one of our police courts has been widely circulated in an Eastern newspaper, as illustrating (but not glorifying) English law. A man for beating his ass is sentenced to prison for a month, and the Magistrate expresses regret that he is not allowed to inflict a severer punishment. The culprit grumbles in reply that it is very hard upon him; for he had beaten his wife worse, and had only been sent to prison for eight days.

The law has of late been partially improved, and there is hope that it is about to be further improved, in regard to married women's property. But this cannot wisely set aside the inquiry -Why was such law ever made? what false principle in men's hearts or minds dictated it? does that principle still live and thrive? Unless we tear up the root of bitterness, inveterate injustice never can be subdued. To wish for justice and shudder at novelty of principle, is but to wish for an end and dread the means, a signal and common type of weakness. Enlightened despots have sometimes appointed official Protectors of aborigines, who cannot be incorporated into the common citizenship of colonists. If the male sex had, in the eight hundred years to which England looks back, appointed Protectors of the female sex, no one can say how many of the worst oppressions might have been mitigated, or removed. It has indeed been said by some, that free colonists have been more oppressive to aborigines than despotic sovereigns. Be this as it may, it is clear that every class is practically selfish, not through evil intent, but from not feeling how the law pinches other classes. When the power and duty of the Crown to protect the weaker classes is removed, it is found that they do not always gain through the constitutional liberty of the classes above them. Hence, when the principle of self-protection for classes is established in part of a nation, events press on and on to the representation of every class, as absolutely necessary for social justice. And this points to the only creditable reply to the question, Why has our law been so unjust to women ?-Because woman never had a voice in the

making of it, and men, as a class, have not realized the oppression of women as a class. Men have deep in their hearts the idea that women ought to be their legal inferiors; that neither the persons of women nor their property ought to remain their own; that marriage is not a free union on equal terms; and that the law ought to favour the stronger sex against the weaker. It is remarkable that our law is more unjust to women than that of the great historically despotic nations, and in some important respects less favourable than that of the Turks. All these things point out that equality of the sexes in respect to the Parliamentary Franchise is essential to justice. The conscience of men is opening to the truth. The horrors attested in the newspapers, and the revelations of the Divorce Courts, forbid longer inaction. Societies for promoting women's power of self-protection by equal right of suffrage are arising. The reader, male or female, is exhorted to aid in this work, as circumstances permit.

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INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL TENDENCIES OF

FEMALE SUFFRAGE.-1867.

T is already observable that the same persons are earnest for Female Suffrage and for a more solid Female Education. This is no accident. The one object is a complement of the other.

Women, with no school but that of life, may exercise the suffrage for the benefit of their whole sex, wherever the interests of the two sexes clash. Obviously neither woman nor man can use the vote to its noblest purposes without a wide groundwork of solid knowledge. Less obvious is it, that superficiality in women's education will be undermined, when the sexes have equal weight in the ultimate decision of social questions; a topic which may here be briefly opened.

Energy in mental pursuits is with most natures dependent on the further objects proposed. A few, only a few, are naturally bent on thorough knowledge, with perhaps a genius for one study, which they will follow for its own sake: but the majority ask, what after-ends it will serve. It is in vain that a College gives prizes for Latin and Greek, if it has not a career to which they lead. It is of little avail to open free schools to the poor, if they see no benefit to be gained by their children. To have a motive for study which acts uniformly on minds not of themselves on fire for knowledge, is the first desideratum for any wide-spread mental activity.

If to shine in the drawing-room be the object held up before a young lady's mind, we know what accomplishments and what graces it will chiefly foster. We admire them; we praise them; but it is felt that to stop there is superficial culture, having in fact little moral basis. Unless the Philanthropy native to the sex have given sufficient impulse to solid thought, their conversation soon exhausts its topics and becomes insipid. If it is to be only volatile, if it always dreads depth and earnestness, the person who lives much for it can hardly be deep and earnest. Conversation must often be, and ought to be, on the surface alone of things; but even that is most charming, when a richly endowed intellect underlies and the heart is full of noble desires.

Philanthropy and Politics, now flowing apart, will unite in one stream, when philanthropists become conscious of power to reach the sources of crime and misery, and when statesmen understand that their functions are assigned to them for none but a philanthropic end. While women are totally unable to influence public measures, no sooner are they relieved from inevitable duty, than, like men under despotism, too many of them tend to frivolity or to petty thoughts. Religion and kindliness may carry some into efforts to relieve distress; special studies may attract others; but these are the exception. How few of us will or can persevere in self-denial, if we seem to be striving for the impossible; if, while we are painfully draining a small pool of misery, a new and full tide pours in! Under the crushing belief that, labour as we may, the result will be imperceptible, most of us turn away from a heartbreaking task, and try to forget other people's wretchedness.

That mankind may reach a better state, philanthropy, like religion, must be the work and duty of all, not of a select few. With a view to this, women (whose heart is our great reservoir of tenderness) must have a hope of, not merely palliating, but, uprooting national evils. This hope will be born within them, when with a voice in public counsel they get some power to reach the causes of evil. Men too will then imbibe more of gentleness and sympathy; men, who have hitherto held nearly exclusive sway over human history with so very meagre success. Party politics will go down, philanthropic politics will come up, when it is understood that, because our common welfare is our common duty, therefore we are all bound to become politicians in that wide and genial sense, in which an ancient philosopher pronounced, that "the human being is a political animal."

Women who are aware that the power gained by knowledge may bring substantial benefit-to themselves first, and through the public efficacy of their vote, to others also,-will not, collectively as a sex, prefer the abstract and pretentious to the solid and fruitful. If then in the richest classes they continue to care chiefly for showy accomplishments, they will have to feel the superior influence of other women. The great majority will be unable to limit their aspirations to the drawing-room, and to these study will present itself in a new point of view, when it has a practical bearing. They need first, not high science, nor knowledge of things remote in time and interest, but a thorough practical understanding of that world with which we are in immediate contact.

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