t like Saturn, who destroys its offspring.

_Hipparchia._ Marriage is now to women what all trades and professions
are to men. Spinsters are supposed to have no chance in life,--neither
liberty of action nor of ideas. Hence, rather than not marry at all, a
woman will marry anybody; and, like Shenstone's Gratia,

"Choose to attend a monkey here
Before an ape below."

This prejudice is almost as strong and as absurd as the Mormon notion
that a woman cannot get to heaven unless she is sealed to some saint. It
has driven hundreds of women, who might have been happy single, into a
slavery for life from which there is no relief. A husband, if he find
that the connubial paradise he dreamed of turns out to be the other
place, has the world all before him where to choose; but the lady is
"cabined, cribbed,--confined" possibly: it is in the course of things.
But when new fields of employment are thrown open to women, those who
cannot marry, or who do not wish to marry, will lead useful and pleasant
lives, and cease to be "superfluous existences,--inartistic figures,
crowding the canvas of life without adequate effect." But all our
reforms centre in one great point, on which our eyes are hopefully
fixed,--I mean, the right to vote. Give women a vote, and at once they
will take a direct interest in the business of life. They will have
something to think of, and something to do. It will be the best form of
education. Mr. Lecky, in his interesting, though perhaps rather windy,
"History of Rationalism," has a passage that expresses my opinion and my
hope. "If the suffrage should ever be granted to women, it would
probably, after two or three generations, effect a complete revolution
in their habits of thought, which, by acting upon the first period of
education, would influence the whole course of opinion." Mr. Mill, it is
well known, is warmly in favor of it. He has been abundantly sneered at
in England for this crotchet, as they call it,--although it is not easy
to see why it should be ridiculous for women to vote in a country
governed by a queen.

_Aristippus._ In this I am with you. I have always thought it absurd
that the ignorant Irishman who drives the carriage of a rich widow
should have a voice in the government of the country, and that the
employer, whose money enables him to live, should have none. In Austria,
women who hold real property in their own right have the right to vote.
I would go a step further, and