take
the responsibilities."

Gradual emancipation, in short!--for fear of trusting truth and justice to
take care of themselves. Who knew, when the negroes were set free, whether
they would at first use their freedom well, or ill? Would they work? would
they avoid crimes? would they justify their freedom? The theory of
education and preparation seemed very plausible. Against that, there was
only the plain theory which Elizabeth Heyrick first announced to
England,--"Immediate, unconditional emancipation." "The best preparation
for freedom is freedom." What was true of the negroes then is true of women
now.

"The lovelier traits of womanhood," writes earnestly our correspondent,
"simplicity, faith, guilelessness, unfit them to conduct public affairs,
where one must deal with quacks and charlatans.... We are not all at once
'as gods, knowing good and evil;' and the very innocency of our lives, and
the habits of pure homes, unfit us to manage a certain class who will flock
to this standard."

But the basis of all republican government is in the assumption that good
is ultimately stronger than evil. If we once abandon this, our theory has
gone to pieces, at any rate. If we hold to it, good women are no more
helpless and useless than good men. The argument that would here
disfranchise women has been used before now to disfranchise clergymen. I
believe that in some States they are still disfranchised; and, if they are
not, it is partly because good is found to be as strong as evil, after all,
and partly because clergymen are not found to be so angelically good as to
be useless. I am very confident that both these truths will be found to
apply to women also.

Whatever else happens, we may be pretty sure that one thing will. The first
step towards the enfranchisement of women will blow to the winds the
tradition of the angelic superiority of women. Just so surely as women
vote, we shall occasionally have women politicians, women corruptionists,
and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of courtesy, that none such
now exist, they will be born as inevitably, after enfranchisement, as the
frogs begin to pipe in the spring. Those who doubt it ignore human nature;
and, if they are not prepared for this fact, they had better consider it in
season, and take sides accordingly. In these pages, at least, they have
been warned.

What then? Suppose women are not "as gods, knowing good and evil:" they are
not to be emancipated as