obtain her share of all social
advantages. Long may those ribbons wave! Meanwhile I think the fact that it
is easier for the gentleman of the house to control the dress of his groom
than for the lady to dictate that of her waiting-maid,--this must count
against the theory that it is women who are the natural aristocrats.

Women are no doubt more sensitive than men upon matters of taste and
breeding. This is partly from a greater average fineness of natural
perception, and partly because their more secluded lives give them less of
miscellaneous contact with the world. If Maud Muller and her husband had
gone to board at the same boarding-house with the Judge and his wife, that
lady might have held aloof from the rustic bride, simply from inexperience
in life, and not knowing just how to approach her. But the Judge, who might
have been talking politics or real estate with the young farmer on the
doorsteps that morning, would certainly find it easier to deal with him as
a man and a brother at the dinner-table. From these different causes women
get the credit or discredit of being more aristocratic than men are; so
that in England the Tory supporters of female suffrage base it on the
ground that these new voters at least will be conservative.

But, on the other hand, it is women, even more than men, who are attracted
by those strong qualities of personal character which are always the
antidote to aristocracy. No bold revolutionist ever defied the established
conventionalisms of his times without drawing his strongest support from
women. Poet and novelist love to depict the princess as won by the outlaw,
the gypsy, the peasant. Women have a way of turning from the insipidities
and proprieties of life to the wooer who has the stronger hand; from the
silken Darnley to the rude Bothwell. This impulse is the natural corrective
to the aristocratic instincts of womanhood; and though men feel it less, it
is still, even among them, one of the supports of republican institutions.
We need to keep always balanced between the two influences of refined
culture and of native force. The patrician class, wherever there is one, is
pretty sure to be the more refined; the plebeian class, the more energetic.
That woman is able to appreciate both elements is proof that she is quite
capable of doing her share in social and political life. This English
clergyman's wife, who devotes her soul to the trimmings and gored skirts of
the lower orders, is