ee country would listen to any offers of
good and skilful administration, in return for the abdication of
freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful
administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their
own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny
under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his
feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of public
affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point,
women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been said or
written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling
influence of free government--the nerve and spring which it gives to
all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to
the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and
calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the
generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a
moral, spiritual, and social being--is every particle as true of
women as of men. Are these things no important part of individual
happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging
from boyhood--from the tutelage and control of even loved and
affectionate elders--and entering upon the responsibilities of
manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy
weight, or releasing him from obstructive, even if not otherwise
painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a
human being, as before? And does he imagine that women have none of
these feelings? But it is a striking fact, that the satisfactions and
mortifications of personal pride, though all in all to most men when
the case is their own, have less allowance made for them in the case
of other people, and are less listened to as a ground or a
justification of conduct, than any other natural human feelings;
perhaps because men compliment them in their own case with the names
of so many other qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty
an influence these feelings exercise in their own lives. No less
large and powerful is their part, we may assure ourselves, in the
lives and feelings of women. Women are schooled into suppressing them
in their most natural and most healthy direction, but the internal
principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and
energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the
command of itself, it will assert its per