t to create any prejudice, in favour of the
arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to
men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history,
and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no
presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a
strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human
improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies,
warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the
past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear.

For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world--the
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern
social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It
is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and
chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but
are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as
offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle.
All were born to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it
by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from
it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born
slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians,
others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and
_roturiers_. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor,
except by the will of his master, become so. In most European
countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and
as a consequence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could
be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive
heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it
was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the
industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or
were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their
calling within its local limits; and nobody could practise any
calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner--by processes
authoritatively prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory
for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods.
In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have
participated most largely in all other modern improvemen