must rest. He who invents
with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably,
from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered
equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest
labours of art."--_Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses_, Disc. vii.]

CHAPTER IV.

There remains a question, not of less importance than those already
discussed, and which will be asked the most importunately by those
opponents whose conviction is somewhat shaken on the main point. What
good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and
institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free?
If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt to make a social
revolution in the name of an abstract right?

It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in
respect to the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage.
The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in
innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual
men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or uncandid
persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme, or which
attain publicity, may say that the evils are exceptional; but no one
can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases, to their
intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power
cannot be very much checked while the power remains. It is a power
given, or offered, not to good men, or to decently respectable men,
but to all men; the most brutal, and the most criminal. There is no
check but that of opinion, and such men are in general within the
reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves. If such men did
not brutally tyrannize over the one human being whom the law compels
to bear everything from them, society must already have reached a
paradisiacal state. There could be no need any longer of laws to curb
men's vicious propensities. Astraea must not only have returned to
earth, but the heart of the worst man must have become her temple.
The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all
the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through
which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It
is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which
a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to
the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that
this o