is both an injustice to the individuals, and a detriment to
society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties
for their own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the
other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of
human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent
person from making, or from persisting in, the attempt.

If this general principle of social and economical science is not
true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old system
of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we
ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born
a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of
white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's
position through all life--shall interdict people from all the more
elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable
occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended
as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved
to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal
qualification for members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen
years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a
real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no
gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to
choose unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to
choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those
who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most
unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of
selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the
competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.

At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women
are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take
persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their
lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is
that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of
the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that
family can, by any means but the course of hereditary succession,
att